Tech
Is there no stopping the AI spending spree? | Computer Weekly
Expect datacentre spending to increase tenfold. That was among the claims Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made during the company’s latest quarterly earnings call. He forecast that capital expenditure (CapEx) on datacentres would increase from the $300-400bn mark today to $3-4tn by 2030.
Huang’s remarks at the end of February came a few days after Microsoft’s AI Tour London event, when CEO Satya Nadella effectively called for enterprise software developers to use the capabilities now built into Microsoft 365 to create agentic AI workflows for streamlining business processes.
Nadella discussed the need to have an efficient token factory, where phrases or tokens can be streamed into AI engines that interpret natural language for querying large language models (LLMs). The Microsoft vision of enterprise AI is built on the M365 foundation, which acts as a knowledge store on which a new category of knowledge-based software can be built.
During his keynote presentation, Nadella spoke about the intelligence that exists in the various IT systems used across the business. He said that businesses should be able to harness the intelligence that already exists enterprise-wide, starting with what he described as the “data underneath Microsoft 365”, which, according to Nadella, represents the people in the business, their relationship to coworkers, and work artefacts such as projects, calendars and communications data. “This is massive information,” he said, which can be used to bootstrap agentic AI projects.
“Our goal is to have all of the innovation and the systems available in the token factory,” said Nadella. “That way you can build software which has the ability to use all of the capability [we provide] to train models and deliver models for inference.”
In effect, he sees the Windows software developer ecosystem evolving to where it is now a Microsoft 365 ecosystem, where enterprise data is stored in AI-enabled office productivity tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and Outlook, and these can be used as the foundation for a new generation of applications that can draw on these AI knowledge sources.
It is this idea that all software will need to be knowledge-aware, which Huang spoke about during the company’s earnings call. “Token generation is at the centre of almost everything that relates to software in the future and relates to computing,” he said. “If you look at the way we use computing in the past, however, the amount of computation demand for software in the past is a tiny fraction of what is necessary in the future.”
According to Huang, the amount of computation necessary to run AI is 1,000 times higher than the computing power needed to run non-AI software. “The computing demand is just a lot higher,” he said. “And so, if we continue to believe there’s value in it, then the world will invest to produce that token.”
When asked whether Nvidia is confident that its customers will continue to have the ability to spend more on AI infrastructure, which could impact Nvidia’s ability to grow, Huang spoke about the opportunity in enterprises to make use of agentic AI and its widespread usefulness across organisations.
“We have now seen the inflection of agentic AI, and the usefulness of agents across the world and enterprises everywhere,” he said. “You’re seeing incredible compute demand because of it. In this new world of AI, compute is revenues. Without compute, there’s no way to generate tokens. Without tokens, there’s no way to grow revenues.”
At least, that is how he positioned AI for the investment bank analysts on the earnings call. The company posted fourth quarter revenue of $68bn, up 73% year-over-year. Datacentre revenue increased by 75% to $62bn, which Nvidia said was being driven by demand for its Blackwell architecture and AI inference deployments. It also reported networking revenue of $1bn, up 3.5x year-over-year, fuelled by adoption of NVLink, Spectrum X and other Nvidia ethernet technologies.
Last year, during his keynote presentation at the GTC conference in the US, Huang claimed that the lowest cost per token was being achieved using the most expensive GPU – which at the time was the Grace Blackwell NVLink 72.
Nvidia describes the GB200 Grace Blackwell as a “superchip”, which connects two high-performance Nvidia Blackwell Tensor Core GPUs and the Nvidia Grace CPU with the NVLink-Chip-to-Chip (C2C) interface, capable of delivering 900 GBytes/s of bidirectional bandwidth.
Significantly, the architecture means that applications have coherent access to a unified memory space. According to Nvidia, this simplifies programming and supports the larger memory needs of trillion-parameter LLMs, transformer models for multimodal tasks, models for large-scale simulations, and generative models for 3D data.
‘Huang’s Law’
Some industry observers have coined the term “Huang’s Law” to describe his perspective of how each new generation of GPU delivers a 10x increase in performance, compared with Moore’s Law’s doubling of performance every 18 months.
Nadella and Huang both spoke about how newer hardware is more energy-efficient at running AI workloads. During the Microsoft AI tour, Nadella noted that today’s system supports an entirely different memory hierarchy, which he said means “there’s now no latency with AI inference”.
The messaging from both the Microsoft and Nvidia chiefs is that the best efficiency is achieved by taking advantage of the capabilities available in these new systems. “There’s an unbelievable renaissance happening with these systems and workloads, whether they’re training workloads or inference workloads, they are unlike anything we’ve seen in the past,” said Nadella.
The tech sector is dead set on getting enterprises to adopt more and more AI. It is being built into knowledge-aware enterprise software likely to draw on the capabilities available in the newest generation of AI acceleration hardware.
Clearly, the business models of Microsoft and Nvidia are tied to increased demand for AI. But it is also apparent that the cost of deploying advanced AI systems is not going to get any cheaper. If anything, capital expenditure on datacentres will continue to increase at a phenomenal rate, fuelled by demand for these new AI systems and the AI acceleration hardware they need.
Hyundai has unveiled its Ioniq 3, a fully electric compact hatchback for urban driving designed to be as aerodynamically efficient as possible yet still offer up a surprisingly spacious interior—a trick the carmaker is loftily calling Aero Hatch. The 3 is intended to fill the gap between Hyundai’s Inster supermini and Ioniq 5 crossover.
In profile, the Ioniq 3 has a sleek front end that transitions into a roofline that stays straight over both front and rear occupants before dropping to merge with the rear spoiler. It’s this roofline that maximizes interior headroom for the rear passengers, but it also offers a supposed class-leading drag coefficient of 0.263.
The car has the same underpinnings as its sibling brand, Kia’s EV2. Two battery options will deliver a projected WLTP distance of 344 km (around 214 miles) for the Standard Range Ioniq 3; the Long Range version is supposedly good for a competitive 308-mile range. Built on the group’s Electric-Global Modular Platform (E-GMP), the car has a 400-volt architecture to lower costs rather than the 800-volt system of the Ioniq 5 N, 6, or 9 SUV. Still, this means that if you can find sufficiently fast DC charging, you can, in theory, top up from 10 to 80 percent in approximately 29 minutes (AC charging capability is up to 22 kW).
This is fine, but it is not a match for BYD’s new Blade 2.0 battery tech that WIRED tried, astonishingly allowing the Denza Z9 GT to charge its battery in just over nine minutes from 10 percent. True, that battery tech was in a $100,000 “premium” EV, but it’s coming to BYD’s wider models. And if BYD makes good on its plans to deliver a charging network to rival Tesla’s Supercharger, then very soon buyers will be expecting comparable charge times, and 30 minutes will quickly feel awfully long.
I asked José Muñoz, Hyundai Motor Company president and CEO, whether this new battery technology from BYD concerns him, whether Hyundai—leading the EV pack with 800-volt architectures for so long—needs to match the Blade 2.0’s performance. “We welcome the challenge,” Muñoz tells me. “Every challenge is an opportunity to do better. And I can tell you that, lately, we have a lot of opportunities to do better.”
“We are also working on fast charging,” Muñoz says, adding that Hyundai’s success will be built on not merely one leading technology but many. “There are not more elements that may be offered by the Chinese that we can offer. It’s only a matter of how you mix them. A lot of times, you get stuck into one indicator. I’m an engineer. And we always have the example of the airplanes: What is more important in an airplane, altitude or speed? There is only one answer. You need to achieve both.”
Prego, the pasta sauce company, is getting into hardware with a device that sits on your table and records dinner conversations. No, this isn’t April Fools’.
The Connection Keeper is a round puck that houses two microphones for recording around the table. The recorder was developed in partnership with StoryCorps, the 20-year-old nonprofit that has recorded conversations with more than 720,000 people about their lives.
The Connection Keeper is more of a publicity stunt than a readily available product. Fewer than 100 will be made. The pucks look more like a tuna can than what you’d associate with the pasta sauce brand—small and meant to be tucked aside so as not to attract attention. The whole goal here, Prego and StoryCorps say, is to advocate for keeping people off their phones during dinner.
“Everything now is AI, and everyone has their phones on the table,” says Elyce Henkin, a managing director of StoryCorps studios and brand partnerships. “It interrupts the conversation and the flow. We wanted to get rid of that and go back to the basics and have everyone talking to each other.”
The pucks come packaged with cards inspired by StoryCorps, designed to prompt conversations between family members. Some are aimed at kids; some are aimed at parents or other family members.
The device doesn’t record automatically. Press a button, and the device begins recording CD-quality audio. Push the button again to stop. It records all the audio on a 16-GB microSD card that can hold up to eight hours of audio at a time. Those recordings can then be saved on a StoryCorps microsite or the family’s own storage. There is no cloud connection, no Wi-Fi, and no artificial intelligence features whatsoever.
The more communal element of the project is that StoryCorps will allow users to share their recordings on its website (or keep them private). Anything that has been voluntarily shared will also be physically preserved as a recording along with the larger StoryCorps collection within the US Library of Congress.
Prego is a US company, named after the Italian word for “you’re welcome.” I’ll tell you this from experience growing up in an Italian-American extended family: The Connection Keeper is going to have a hell of a time keeping track of a conversation at a table full of loud uncles and your wine-drunk grandma, who all talk at the same time.
“I think it’s how a lot of families are,” Henkin says. “What StoryCorps does is that it reminds us of our similarities and the humanity that’s in us all, even though we are all different. I imagine that if someone were to go through and listen to the collection, there would be rowdy moments, and there would be kids laughing and moms saying, ‘Don’t eat with your mouth full.’ That’s all part of the truth of it.”
Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra 2 earbuds are the best noise-canceling earbuds you can buy. Right now, they’re $50 off, which matches the best price we tend to see outside of special events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you want to wait until November, they might hit $200 again, but otherwise $250 is a very fair deal—especially since they pop back up to $300 regularly. The discounted price applies to all five color options, including Black, Deep Plum, Desert Gold, Midnight Violet, and White Smoke (another rarity, as usually only the vivid colors go on sale).
Sometimes you just need to quiet the world. Whether it’s to play 10 hours of Coconut Mall on a loop to help you lock in and meet your Friday deadlines (thanks to my colleague Julia Forbes for that suggestion); muffle the crying babies, sniffling neighbors, and mysterious, potentially concerning clunking noises on an airplane; or to help you better appreciate the mix on Space Laces’ Vaultage 004 EP, active noise cancellation makes a huge difference to your listening experience.
The Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2 earbuds also have some of the best active noise cancellation you can find. They sound great out of the box, thanks to a custom sound profile based on the shape of your ears, but you can customize the EQ by using the app. The app also allows you to tweak touch controls and spatial audio.
The battery life lasts for about six hours, or 24 with the charging case. And while the noise cancellation can’t be beaten, these also have a pass-through feature called Aware mode, which filters in outside noise but smooths the loudest bits. That means you’ll be able to hear what’s going on, but you won’t be startled. True-crime podcast listeners, this one’s for you.
In fact, just about the only drawback we can find is that these might not be ideal for folks with super-small ears. Otherwise, they’re great all around, with solid call quality, excellent sound overall, and a sleek aesthetic. We think they offer good value at full price, so an extra $50 off is especially nice.
If you’re in the market for new headphones, but these don’t exactly fit what you’re looking for, we have plenty of other recommendations. Check out our guides to the Best Wireless Earbuds, Best Headphones for Working Out, Best Noise-Canceling Headphones, and Best Open Earbuds for additional hand-tested picks.
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