All articles tagged with #ai datacenters
President Trump announced a Microsoft-led initiative to ensure AI datacenters do not raise local electricity bills or overuse water, with Microsoft agreeing to pay property taxes and forego tax breaks or electricity-rate discounts, as part of a broader plan to balance AI infrastructure growth with community costs and limited incentives for other tech firms.
The surge in demand for electricity, particularly from AI datacenters, is posing a challenge for utilities in the US. Brian Janous, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloverleaf Infrastructure and former energy-focused hire at Microsoft, discusses the implications of this growth and how utilities can meet the increasing demand. The conversation includes considerations such as building more gas plants, optimizing existing infrastructure, the politics of AI datacenters, and the impact on the net-zero commitments of major tech companies.
Microsoft is reportedly developing its own networking card for AI datacenters to reduce reliance on Nvidia's hardware and optimize its Azure infrastructure, following the development of its own 128-core datacenter CPU and Maia 100 GPU. The company's acquisition of Fungible has provided the necessary networking technologies and IP for this endeavor, with Pradeep Sindhu leading the project. The new networking card aims to improve the performance and efficiency of Azure servers, potentially impacting Nvidia's server networking gear sales. This move aligns with the industry trend of cloud providers developing their own custom silicon, but the initial results may still be years away.