Netflash

China has begun cautiously reopening access to Nvidia’s advanced AI processors, granting approvals to a small group of its largest technology companies. The companies include ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, which are expected to collectively purchase more than 400,000 of Nvidia’s H200 accelerators, according to Reuters . Other technology firms may line up for approvals in subsequent rounds. The …

The US Department of Energy (DoE) program that would see three new experimental commercial nuclear reactors launched by July 4 is the driver behind the secret rewriting of nuclear safety and security standards, says a report released Wednesday by NPR. It said, “sweeping changes [which have not been made public] were made to accelerate development of a new generation of nuclear reactor designs” kn…

For years, CSOs have worried about their IT infrastructure being used for unauthorized cryptomining. Now, say researchers, they’d better start worrying about crooks hijacking and reselling access to exposed corporate AI infrastructure. In a report released Wednesday , researchers at Pillar Security say they have discovered campaigns at scale going after exposed large language model (LLM) and MCP …

The Carrier Ethernet market is undergoing a significant shift as AI workloads demand new performance validation from network infrastructure. Mplify, the alliance formerly known as MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum), is responding with a dual certification strategy that preserves decades of carrier investment while creating a pathway for AI-ready transport validation. This week, the organization announced…

Amazon is cutting about 16,000 jobs across the company, SVP of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti wrote in an email to employees Wednesday. The cuts were widely expected — and although Galetti’s email did not mention Amazon Web Services, the cuts came as no surprise to AWS staff, some of whom were prematurely invited to a meeting to discuss them, according to news reports. SVP for AWS …

Meta has announced a $6 billion, multi-year fiber supply agreement with Corning, highlighting how AI infrastructure constraints are shifting beyond compute and into the physical network. Under the agreement, Corning will supply Meta with optical fiber, cable, and connectivity solutions to “accelerate the buildout of the most advanced data centers in the United States to support Meta’s apps, techn…

ThousandEyes, a Cisco company, monitors how ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services are handling any performance challenges and provides Network World with a weekly roundup of events that impact service delivery. Read on to see the latest analysis, and stop back next week for another update on internet and cloud traffic performance. Note: We have archived prior-year outage updates, includ…

Enterprises aren’t totally sold on AI, but they’re increasingly buying into AI agents. Not the cloud-hosted models we hear so much about, but smaller, distributed models that fit into IT as it has been used by enterprises for decades. Given this, you surely wonder how it’s going. Are agents paying back? Yes. How do they impact hosting, networking, operations? That’s complicated. Right now, of 394…

Signaling that the future of AI may not just be how many tokens an AI model generates, but how optimally it does so, Microsoft has announced Maia 200, which it described as a breakthrough inference accelerator and inference powerhouse. The AI silicon is designed for heterogeneous AI infrastructure in multiple environments, and was specifically developed for inferencing on large reasoning models. …

Neurophos has landed another $110 million in funding from investors including Gates Frontier, Bill Gates’ venture capital outfit, to move its photonic chips nearer to production. The growing use of AI has led to increasing demands on computational power within data centers. Traditional silicon-based processors are struggling to meet these demands, leading to limitations on performance at the same…

Intel said that it is facing a CPU shortage, particularly affecting the data center/server business, but that it expects the problem to peak this quarter and ease throughout the year. The comments came on the earnings call to discuss fourth quarter 2025 earnings , which stated that revenue declined 4% year-over-year to $13.7 billion, the same as the previous quarter and slightly above company pro…

Nvidia changed its requirements for suppliers of the next generation of high-bandwidth memory, HBM4, but is close to certifying revised chips from Samsung Electronics for use in its AI systems, according to reports. Nvidia revised its specifications for memory chips for its Rubin platform in the third quarter of 2025, semiconductor market analyst TrendForce reported earlier this month . It said S…

Enterprises are seeing jumps in storage prices that started last year and will extend into 2026, researchers predict, due to unprecedented demand related to AI deployments and the growth in data in general. As a result, some enterprises may defer on-prem AI projects for a few months until availability increases and prices stabilize. “Storage needs are always expanding,” says Falko Kuester , engin…

In 2026, lower-end PCs may be more difficult to come by, and for those that are available, price tags may rise. This is fallout from Intel’s plans to pivot its manufacturing capacity from chips for PCs to Xeon processors to support intensive AI workloads. The company has admitted that it had miscalculated demand for its data center products, and will now go all-in on AI-ready hardware . This stra…

As the market slows down, AWS and other Amazon units are preparing for another round of layoffs, which is expected to overwhelmingly impact tech talent. “Amazon is planning a second round of job cuts next week as part of its broader goal of trimming some 30,000 corporate workers,” Reuters reported . “The company in October cut some 14,000 white-collar jobs, about half of the 30,000 target first r…