Data Center News

With the rise of new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), more attention is being paid to physical constraints: energy and water consumption of data centres, critical minerals needed for microchips and electrical grids, geographical bottlenecks in supply chains amid geopolitical unrest. All of the above are hugely important and must be considered when growing a tech business.

TES Power said resilient data centre infrastructure is playing a growing role in supporting the FIFA World Cup as the tournament's digital demands expand. The Northern Ireland manufacturer said the enlarged competition is increasing pressure on the systems behind live broadcasting, streaming, ticketing, security and fan services. Hosted across 16 cities in the United States, Canada and Mexico, the tournament features 48 teams and 104 matches.

Google has added GPU and TPU support to managed DRANET on Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot clusters, extending automated network resource allocation for accelerator-based workloads in its managed Kubernetes service. GKE Autopilot users can now set up Pods that request network interfaces for TPUs and Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA, without managing the underlying nodes directly.

Google Cloud has made its C4N network- and storage-optimised virtual machine instances generally available, extending its Compute Engine range for data-intensive workloads. The new instance family targets applications that need high network throughput or heavy block storage use, including databases, network appliances, analytics and some artificial intelligence inference tasks.

DE-CIX and South Front Networks have partnered to extend access to DE-CIX Chicago for internet service providers in the Upper Midwest, adding 20 points of presence across Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. The deal targets smaller carriers that want access to content and gaming networks in Chicago without establishing their own point of presence in the city.

Firewalla has launched a family of managed network switches, adding wired infrastructure to its Zero Trust networking platform. The new products, Switch X and Switch SE, are designed to bring the company's network segmentation, device visibility and access controls to wired devices through the same management system used for its existing products.

StorONE has released Version 4.0 of its storage platform, allowing existing third-party all-flash arrays to serve as the flash tier in its real-time tiering system. The update expands an earlier approach that already let customers use spare flash resources and retired systems within the same architecture. Under the new version, organisations can also assign capacity from active production all-flash arrays, while StorONE-managed hard disk drive capacity serves as the lower-cost tier.

Google has been named a Leader in Gartner's inaugural Magic Quadrant for AI Infrastructure, ranking highest for Ability to Execute and furthest for Completeness of Vision. The recognition focuses on Google Cloud's AI infrastructure business, where Google is seeking to expand its position among customers building and running large AI models and agent-based systems. Its infrastructure work builds on systems developed internally for products including Gemini, YouTube, and Search.

AHOY has formed a strategic partnership with Will Be Live to expand its presence in North America. Will Be Live will work with AHOY's leadership team on enterprise engagement, strategic partnerships, channel development, and the creation of a reseller network for AHOY's Physical AI and sovereign infrastructure products. Based in Montreal, AHOY says its technology is already used in transportation, aviation, utilities, government, logistics, and enterprise settings across dozens of countries.

NVIDIA and Hugging Face have added NVIDIA Isaac GR00T 1.7 and the NVIDIA Isaac Teleop framework to the LeRobot open-source robotics library, extending their work on shared tools for robot development. The additions bring two NVIDIA technologies into LeRobot, Hugging Face's library for training, running and sharing robot datasets, models, policies and workflows. Cosmos 3, NVIDIA's world foundation model for physical AI, is also due to be added later.