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Here is today’s rundown:

• FEATURED: How did Intel lose $7 Billion last year on chips?

• BIG DEALS/DEVELOPMENTS: Consolidation everywhere - Hivelocity, ColoHouse, Cyxtera, Evoque, plus Samsung steals an order from NVIDIA

• COOLING, TECH, AND POWER: MatX takes on LLM training, when DCs go quantum, NVIDIA wants to design DCs with digital twins (VIDEO)

Est. read time: 4mins 45secs

- Featured -

How did Intel lose $7 billion making chips?

News hit the street on Tuesday that Intel’s foundry division had an operating loss of more than $7 billion last year.

But don’t worry…

They plan on losing even more this year.

Intel lost $5.2 billion making chips in 2022 and says while they expected steep losses coming in 2023, 2024 will be the worst year for its chip-making unit.

On the bright side, the company projects break-even occurring sometime in 2027.

Bad decisions and high costs

CEO Pat Gelsinder said the foundry business was “weighed down by bad decisions, including one year ago against using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines from Dutch firm ASML.”

As a result of this and other mistakes, Intel outsourced more than 30% of their wafers to external contractors, which has raised manufacturing costs drastically.

They’ve also been spending heavily. Intel has $100 billion allocated to building or expanding chip factories in Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, and Oregon.

And so it goes…

Intel has lost its manufacturing edge to TSMC and Samsung. It has had to lower prices and crunch margins over the years because its chips are no longer premium.

But it’s wooing companies like Microsoft with promises of its “18A manufacturing technology” and its plan to reclaim the crown of chip king.

And with $19 billion in federal subsidies coming their way from the CHIPS act and other Biden initiatives, maybe Intel can turn things around.

Or maybe they’ll keep losing money.

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- Cooling, Tech and More -

1. When data centers go quantum: Oxford Quantum Computing may be the first company to deploy QPU systems in a colocation data center. The firm has launched 6 of its quantum-powered systems at data centers in London and Tokyo.

You can see how that went and where its going, here.

2. Ex-Googlers look to disrupt LLM training: Their new company, MatX, will produce processors they claim will be 10x better at LLM training than Nvidia GPUs. Bold. The company has already raised $25 million and hopes to have something out by 2025.
TweakTown has the full article.

3. NVIDIA demonstrates design speed: Watch the video below. NVIDIA shows how they use digital twins to design their latest data centers at super speed.

The article here is also incredibly interesting.

- Deals and Developments -

ColoHouse acquires Hivelocity, among others

For an undisclosed figure… What a bummer.

ColoHouse is operating as a sort of acquisition vehicle after being acquired by PE firm Valtera Partners in 2021.
Since then Valtera via ColoHouse has purchased controlling interest in seven cloud and colo firms. Among them are Lume Cloud, Steadfast, and Quonix.

The deal with Hivelocity

Hivelocity is a Tampa-based company that does bare metal colocation and cloud services.
ColoHouse CEO said, “Together, ColoHouse and Hivelocity create a unique, next-generation provider that places the customer’s needs and success at the forefront, providing them with the connectivity and computing power required to deploy and manage modern applications and data.”

So they’ve got that going for them. Plus, the combined entities plan to launch a new private cloud offering for enterprise virtualization environments to optimize workloads.

Read the whole press release if you want…

Cyxtera + Evoque = Centersquare Data Centers

Brookfield is at it again. The data center financier is combining the recently defunct Cyxtera (chapter 11, last June), with its in-house data center brand Evoque.

The new company will be called Centersquare, comprising over 400MW across nearly 2 million sqft, and 200MW planned for expansion.

Brookfield bought Cyxtera out of bankruptcy for $775 million in a complicated reorganization deal that concluded in January.
According to DataCenterDynamics, Brookfield Infrastructure’s data center portfolio includes DCI Data Centers in APAC, Data4 in Europe, and Compass Data Centers in North America, among others.

About the merger, Centersquare COO said, “Our rebranding is not just cosmetic. It’s a strategic shift towards offering more sophisticated solutions while maintaining the expert service level that is our hallmark.”

More Big Deals

• Samsung snags a huge order from NVIDIA. Samsung is set to release its first in-house AI accelerator chip, Mach-1. The chips offer advantages over NVIDIA's AI accelerator, including proprietary processors and low-power DRAM chips. The company has secured a deal with Korean internet giant Naver Corp. for up to $752 million, to supply between 150k-200k units.

• Kansas City is set to pop off with a $1 billion Google property. The data center will sit on over 300 acres and comprise more than 1.44 million sqft of floor space! Google will work with Evergy to add 400MW of carbon-free energy to the grid.

  

  Site of new Google DC. Hunt Midwest Business Center

• Lamda Labs Locks down $500 million. The GPU cloud company powered by NVIDIA GPUs announced that it has secured a special purpose GPU financing vehicle of up to $500 million to fund the expansion of its on-demand cloud offering.

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- Taylor