Daniel Robinson

England, London, St Albans

IT Infrastructure Reporter at The Register

Reporter covering enterprise IT infrastructure for @TheRegister. Contact me at [email protected]. Views expressed are my own.

Articles

Nvidia punts silicon photonic switches to keep GPUs fed

1 month ago | theregister.com | Daniel Robinson

GTC Nvidia is set to make available Ethernet and InfiniBand switches featuring silicon photonics with co-packaged optics to advance its vision of datacenters with "millions of GPUs," arguing that the equipment can keep power consumption down.
Los Alamos boffins invent speedometer for satellites

1 month ago | theregister.com | Daniel Robinson

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico say they have developed a Spacecraft Speedometer that can be used to help track satellites in order to avoid orbital collisions. Working with the US Air Force Academy, the LANL boffins have come up with a novel device capable of determining the velocity of a satellite while it is orbiting around Earth, and potentially other planets as well.
Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape US dependency

1 month ago | theregister.com | Daniel Robinson

A group of technology companies and lobbyists want the European Commission (EC) to take action to reduce the region's reliance on foreign-owned digital services and infrastructure. In an open letter to EC President Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen, the group of nearly 100 organizations proposed the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund to invest in key technology and lessen dependence on US corporations.
AI bubble? What bubble? Datacenter investors still all in

1 month ago | theregister.com | Daniel Robinson

Fears that AI may be a bubble about to burst have yet to dent datacenter investment, with a handful of new developments revealed this week. GPU cloud provider CoreWeave has struck a deal with Nordic operator Bulk Infrastructure to serve up a large-scale Nvidia compute cluster from the latter's N01 Datacenter Campus in Norway.
France offers to take in US scientists

1 month ago | theregister.com | Daniel Robinson

American boffins fearful that their work (or should that be "woke"?) activities will draw the disfavor of the Trump administration are being offered sanctuary in the Land of the Free, otherwise known as Europe. Aix-Marseille University in the south of France is launching the Safe Place For Science program, offering a "safe and stimulating environment" for American researchers wishing to pursue their work free from persecution.
OpenAI wants all the data and for US law to apply everywhere

1 month ago | theregister.com | Daniel Robinson

OpenAI wants the US government to ensure it has access to any data it wants to train GenAI models, and to stop foreign countries from trying to enforce copyright rules against it and other American AI firms. Writers sue Anthropic for feeding 'stolen' copyrighted work into ClaudeREAD MOREThe ChatGPT developer submitted an open letter full of proposals to the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) regarding the Trump administration's AI Action Plan⁠, currently under development.
Microsoft says natural gas needed to keep up with AI

1 month ago | theregister.com | Daniel Robinson

Microsoft says there is plenty of wind and solar to power datacenters in the US, but it is still eyeing natural gas generation as it juggles the growing energy needs of AI with its own net-zero commitments. The Redmond tech biz has continued to pour investment into scaling up its infrastructure to support AI.
Geothermal energy pitched as datacenter savior

1 month ago | theregister.com | Daniel Robinson

An independent research body claims that geothermal power generation could provide an answer to the growing energy requirements of datacenters. But there's a catch.
Amazon, Meta, Google want to triple nuclear power by 2050

1 month ago | theregister.com | Daniel Robinson

A group of large-scale energy users including Amazon, Meta, and Google has thrown its weight behind efforts to ramp up global nuclear capacity – aiming to triple it by 2050 – to meet increasing energy demands. The cross-industry collective has signed a pledge [PDF] supporting the goal of at least tripling nuclear capacity around the world by 2050.
US trio wants to pipe coal mine gas to fuel datacenters

1 month ago | theregister.com | Daniel Robinson

Three companies in the US are teaming up to address the burgeoning energy needs of datacenters by using coal mine methane piped to on-site fuel cells at locations that are already hotspots for building bit barns. Diversified Energy, FuelCell Energy, and TESIAC, an investment biz focused on infrastructure, are forming a partnership to meet the soaring demand for reliable power from server facility operators.