Good morning all, this is Cold Isle Insights.
This is your 5-minute update on what’s going on in the world of digital infrastructure and data centers.

Here’s what’s on tap today:

Est. read time: 5mins, 1secs

- Under the Hood -

NVIDIA: The new king of AI? (the market thinks so)

NVIDIA is absolutely going off right now. Recent announcements have made it clear that the Santa Clara-based company is going all in on AI computing, and the market loves it.

AI chips: Earlier this year NVIDIA announced the Hopper GH200 GPU, claiming it to be the world’s first and fastest 4nm data center chip. The thing is huge. 80 billion transistors featuring 4000 TFLOPs computer and HBM3 3TB/s memory.

It was reported last week that SoftBank will use the new GH200 architecture to power their data centers world wide. While they haven’t announced pricing publicly, a single DGX GH200 is estimated to cost upwards of $10 million.

Supercomputing showtime: Israel 1 is the name of NVIDIA’s new supercomputer announced last Monday. The artificial intelligence supercomputer is being built at its current offices in Tel Aviv and will serve as its ethernet-AI cloud reference platform for data centers around the world. 
It will be one of the fastest, most powerful computers in the world. Along with the Israel expansion, NVIDIA has two similar supercomputer projects planned for Taiwan as well.  

Smart move: Around 2006 CEO Jensen Huang made the decision to invest the company’s resources in making their GPU’s programmable. Although unnecessary for most users, the enhanced capabilities allowed researchers to do high-performance computing on consumer hardware.
Because of this, the world has largely built its AI products to run on NVIDIA GPUs. So now that every computing company on earth needs to run generative AI and train large language models, AMD and Intel are going to have a hell of a time dethroning the new king.

- Power and Cooling -

Tesla and Strata are bringing “Scatter Wash” to the desert

The North Carolina-based clean energy provider has partnered with Tesla on a massive $500 million Megapack project in Phoenix. Strata announced last week that the 20-year agreement with APS, Arizona’s largest utility provider, will see them build a new 255MW/ 1 GWh battery storage facility.

Details on Scatter Wash: Named after a stream 7 miles north of Phoenix in Deer Valley, AZ, the initiative, “aims to meet the growing needs of residential and business customers with affordable, reliable and clean energy.”
Strata Clean Energy, who’s known for its solar projects in the Southeast United States, will develop, own, and operate what will be one of the world’s largest battery storage facilities.

Megapack Megagrowth: The Megapack is Tesla’s battery storage product designed for large-scale, utility-grade projects. The design includes 3MWh of storage and 1.5MW of inverter capacity, and it comes factory-assembled and is designed for what they call “infinite scalability.”

The Megapack has seen a huge increase in deployment of late. A 2023 Q1 report saw a 360% growth in Tesla’s storage deployment. If the trend continues, Tesla will be more of a battery company than a car company.

What’s more: Tesla’s foray into storage, with Megapack and Powerwall (its smaller-scale, residential and commercial storage counterpart) marks a potential shift in the business model for the car seller. We expect to see more innovations from Tesla, like more efficient grid-support systems, further integration with renewable energy, and additional business units for utilities and commercial customers. It may be that in 10 years Tesla is more of a power juggernaut than a car company.

- Big Deals -

Microsoft inks deal with NVIDIA-backed cloud co

CoreWeave, the former Ethereum mining company, is now the specialized cloud provider partnering with Microsoft to help support the company’s AI needs, like OpenAi.

It’s NVIDIA again: The cloud computing startup has raised more than $400 million over two funding rounds this year, of which NVIDIA is a large part. CoreWeave offers cloud services designed for large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads and has early, preferential access to NVIDIA’s newest chips.

The bigger picture: Although NVIDIA is dominating the AI chip space, they’re also privy to the fact that tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta have all announced the production of their own in-house AI chips. To stave off the competition, NVIDIA is investing in cloud providers and granting early access to their AI chip technology. 

As for Microsoft, they’ve seen the AI wave coming and have expansion plans which include tripling their data center footprint by year’s end.

- telecom bites -

Multinational telecom giant Lumen will be expanding their Quantum Fiber service in 18 cities. The move will add over 500,000 new passings. FieceTelecom

Despite just recently launching its new 10-gig internet plan in April, telco Ziply will also increase the speeds for its lower tiers as well. FierceTelecom

In a deal valued at $145 million, Verizon will provide USPS with infrastructure upgrades including a transition to cloud capabilities. RCRWireless

Daily Dall-E

“We must pass this deal. This nation is running out of honey!

Thanks a lot for reading.

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- Taylor