Category: 3. Business

  • NVIDIA and Partners Build America’s AI Infrastructure and Create Blueprint to Power the Next Industrial Revolution

    NVIDIA and Partners Build America’s AI Infrastructure and Create Blueprint to Power the Next Industrial Revolution

    US Government Labs and Nation’s Leading Companies Investing in Advanced AI Infrastructure to Power AI Factories and Accelerate US AI Development

      News Summary

    • Seven new systems across Argonne and Los Alamos National Laboratories to be released, accelerating the Department of Energy’s mission of driving technological leadership across U.S. security, science and energy applications.
    • NVIDIA AI Factory Research Center in Virginia to host the first Vera Rubin infrastructure and lay the groundwork for NVIDIA Omniverse DSX, a blueprint for multi‑generation, gigawatt‑scale build‑outs using NVIDIA Omniverse libraries.
    • Leading U.S. companies across server makers, cloud service providers, model builders, technology suppliers and enterprises are investing in advanced AI infrastructure.

    GTC Washington, D.C. — NVIDIA today announced that it is working with the U.S. Department of Energy’s national labs and the nation’s leading companies to build America’s AI infrastructure to support scientific discovery, economic growth and power the next industrial revolution. 

    “We are at the dawn of the AI industrial revolution that will define the future of every industry and nation,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “It is imperative that America lead the race to the future — this is our generation’s Apollo moment. The next wave of inventions, discoveries and progress will be determined by our nation’s ability to scale AI infrastructure. Together with our partners, we are building the most advanced AI infrastructure ever created, ensuring that America has the foundation for a prosperous future, and that the world’s AI runs on American innovation, openness and collaboration, for the benefit of all.”

    NVIDIA AI Advances Scientific Research at National Labs

    NVIDIA is accelerating seven new systems by providing the AI infrastructure to drive scientific research and innovation at two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facilities — Argonne National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

    NVIDIA is collaborating with Oracle and the DOE to build the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest AI supercomputer for scientific discovery. The Solstice system will feature a record-breaking 100,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and support the DOE’s mission of developing AI capabilities to drive technological leadership across U.S. security, science and energy applications.

    Another system, Equinox, will include 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs expected to be available in 2026. Both systems will be located at Argonne, and will be interconnected by NVIDIA networking and deliver a combined 2,200 exaflops of AI performance.

    Argonne is also unveiling three powerful NVIDIA-based systems — Tara, Minerva and Janus — set to expand access to AI-driven computing for researchers across the country. Together, these systems will enable scientists and engineers to revolutionize scientific discovery and boost productivity.

    “Argonne’s collaboration with NVIDIA and Oracle represents a pivotal step in advancing the nation’s AI and computing infrastructure,” said Paul K. Kearns, director of Argonne National Laboratory. “Through this partnership, we’re building platforms that redefine performance, scalability and scientific potential. Together, we are shaping the foundation for the next generation of computing that will power discovery for decades to come.”

    LANL, based in New Mexico, announced the selection of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform and the NVIDIA Quantum‑X800 InfiniBand networking fabric for its next-generation Mission and Vision systems, to be built and delivered by HPE. The Vision system builds on the achievements of LANL’s Venado supercomputer, built for unclassified research. Mission is the fifth Advanced Technology System (ATS5) in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program, which LANL supports, and is expected to be operational in late 2027 and designed to run classified applications.

    The Vera Rubin platform will deliver advanced accelerated computing capabilities for these systems, enabling researchers to process and analyze vast datasets at unprecedented speed and scale. Paired with the Quantum‑X800 InfiniBand fabric, which delivers high network bandwidth with ultralow latency, the platform enables scientists to run complex simulations to advance areas spanning materials science, climate modeling and quantum computing research.

    “Our integration of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform and Quantum X800 InfiniBand fabric represents a transformative advancement of our lab — harnessing this level of computational performance is essential to tackling some of the most complex scientific and national security challenges,” said Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Our work with NVIDIA helps us remain at the forefront of innovation, driving discoveries to strengthen the resilience of our critical infrastructure.”

    NVIDIA AI Factory Research Center and Gigascale AI Factory Blueprint

    NVIDIA also announced the build-out of an AI Factory Research Center at Digital Realty in Virginia. This facility, powered by the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, will accelerate breakthroughs in generative AI, scientific computing and advanced manufacturing and serve as a foundation for pioneering research in digital twins and large‑scale simulation.

    The center lays the groundwork for NVIDIA Omniverse DSX — a blueprint for multi‑generation, gigawatt‑scale build‑outs using NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries — that will set a new standard of excellence for AI infrastructure. By integrating virtual and physical systems, NVIDIA is creating a scalable model for building intelligent facilities that continuously optimize for performance, energy efficiency and sustainability.

    With this new center, NVIDIA and its partners are collaborating to develop Omniverse DSX, which will integrate autonomous control systems and modular infrastructure to power the next generation of AI factories. NVIDIA is collaborating with companies to enable the gigawatt-scale rollout of hyperscale AI infrastructure:

    • Engineering and construction partners Bechtel and Jacobs are working with NVIDIA to integrate advanced digital twins into validated designs across complex architectural, power, mechanical and electrical systems.
    • Power, cooling and energy equipment partners including Eaton, GE Vernova, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Siemens Energy, Tesla, Trane and Vertiv are contributing to the center. Power and system modeling enable AI factories to dynamically interact with utility networks at gigawatt scale. Liquid-cooling, rectification and power-conversion systems optimized for NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin platforms are also modeled in the earlier NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for AI factory digital twins.
    • Software and agentic AI solutions providers including Cadence, Emerald AI, Phaidra, PTC, Schneider Electric ETAP, Siemens and Switch have built digital twin solutions to model and optimize AI factory lifecycles, from design to operation. AI agents continuously optimize power, cooling and workloads, turning the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX blueprint for AI factory digital twins into a self-learning system that boosts grid flexibility, resilience and energy efficiency.

       

    Building the Next Wave of US Infrastructure

    Leading U.S. companies across server makers, cloud service providers, model builders, technology suppliers and enterprises are investing in advanced AI infrastructure to power AI factories and accelerate U.S. AI development.

    System makers Cisco, Dell Technologies, HPE and Supermicro are collaborating with NVIDIA to build secure, scalable AI infrastructure by integrating NVIDIA GPUs and AI software into their full-stack systems. This includes the newly announced NVIDIA AI Factory for Government reference design, which will accelerate AI deployments for the public sector and highly regulated industries.

    In addition, Cisco is launching the new Nexus N9100 switch series powered by NVIDIA Spectrum-X™ Ethernet switch silicon. The switches’ integration with the existing Cisco Nexus management framework will allow customers to seamlessly deploy and manage the new high-speed NVIDIA-powered fabrics using the same trusted tools and operational models they already rely on.

    Cisco will now offer an NVIDIA Cloud Partner-compliant AI factory with the Cisco Cloud reference architecture based on this switch. The N9100 Series switches will be orderable before the end of the year.

    Leading Cloud Providers and Model Builders Accelerate AI

    Cloud providers and model builders are continuing to invest in AI infrastructure to create a diverse ecosystem for AI innovation, ensuring the U.S. remains at the forefront of AI advancements and their practical applications across industries globally.

    The following companies are expanding their commitments to further bolster U.S.-based AI innovation:

    • Akamai is launching Akamai Inference Cloud, a distributed platform that expands AI inference from core data centers to the edge — targeting 20 initial locations across the globe, including five U.S. states, and plans for further expansion — accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO™ Servers.
    • CoreWeave is establishing CoreWeave Federal, a new business focused on providing secure, compliant, high-performance AI cloud infrastructure and services to the U.S. government running on NVIDIA GPUs and validated designs. The initiative includes anticipated FedRAMP and related agency authorizations of the CoreWeave platform.
    • Global AI, a new NVIDIA Cloud Partner, has placed its first big purchase for 128 NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 racks (featuring 9,000+ GPUs), which will be the largest GB300 NVL72 deployment in New York.
    • Google Cloud is offering new A4X Max VMs with NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 and G4 VMs with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, as well as bringing the NVIDIA Blackwell platform on premises and in air-gapped environments with Google Distributed Cloud.
    • Lambda is building a new 100+ megawatt AI factory in Kansas City, Missouri. The supercomputer will initially feature more than 10,000 NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 GPUs to accelerate AI breakthroughs from U.S.-based researchers, enterprises and developers.
    • Microsoft is using NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs on Microsoft Azure, and has recently announced the deployment of a large-scale Azure cluster using NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 for OpenAI. In addition, Microsoft is adding Azure Local support for NVIDIA RTX™ GPUs in the coming months.
    • Oracle recently launched Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Zettascale10, the industry’s largest AI supercomputer in the cloud, powered by NVIDIA AI infrastructure.
    • Together AI, in partnership with 5C, already operates an AI factory in Maryland featuring NVIDIA B200 GPUs and is bringing a new one online soon in Memphis, Tennessee, featuring NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 systems. Both locations are set for near-term expansion, and new locations will be coming up in 2026 to accelerate the development and scaling of AI-native applications.
    • xAI is working on its massive Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, which will house over half a million NVIDIA GPUs — enabling rapid, frontier-level training and inference of next-generation AI models.

       

    US Enterprises Build AI Infrastructure for Industries

    Beyond cloud providers and model builders, U.S. organizations are looking to build and offer AI infrastructure for themselves and others that will accelerate workloads across a variety of industries such as pharmaceutical and healthcare.

    Lilly is building the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful AI factory with an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD™ with NVIDIA DGX™ B300 systems, featuring NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet and NVIDIA Mission Control™ software, which will allow the company to develop and train large-scale biomedical foundation models that aim to accelerate drug discovery and design. This builds on Lilly’s use of NVIDIA RTX PRO Servers to power drug discovery and research by accelerating enterprise AI workloads.

    Mayo Clinic — with access to 20 million digitized pathology slides and one of the world’s largest patient databases — has created an AI factory powered by DGX SuperPOD with DGX B200 systems and NVIDIA Mission Control. This delivers the AI computational power needed to advance healthcare applications such as medical research, digital pathology and personalized care for better patient outcomes.

    Learn more about how NVIDIA and partners are advancing AI innovation in the U.S. by watching the NVIDIA GTC Washington, D.C., keynote by Huang.

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  • NVIDIA Introduces NVQLink — Connecting Quantum and GPU Computing for 17 Quantum Builders and Nine Scientific Labs

    NVIDIA Introduces NVQLink — Connecting Quantum and GPU Computing for 17 Quantum Builders and Nine Scientific Labs

    News Summary: 

    • NVIDIA NVQLink high-speed interconnect lets quantum processors connect to world-leading supercomputing labs including Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.
    • NVQLink provides quantum researchers with a powerful system for the control algorithms needed for large-scale quantum computing and quantum error correction.
    • NVQLink allows researchers to build hybrid quantum-classical systems, accelerating next-generation applications in chemistry and materials science.

    GTC Washington, D.C. — NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA NVQLink™, an open system architecture for tightly coupling the extreme performance of GPU computing with quantum processors to build accelerated quantum supercomputers.

    Researchers from leading supercomputing centers at national laboratories including Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories guided the development of NVQLink, helping accelerate next-generation work on quantum computing. NVQLink provides an open approach to quantum integration, supporting 17 QPU builders, five controller builders and nine U.S national labs.

    Qubits — the units of information enabling quantum computers to process information in ways ordinary computers cannot — are delicate and error-prone, requiring complex calibration, quantum error correction and other control algorithms to operate correctly.

    These algorithms must run over an extremely demanding low-latency, high-throughput connection to a conventional supercomputer to keep on top of qubit errors and enable impactful quantum applications. NVQLink provides that interconnect, enabling the environment needed for future, transformative applications across industries.

    “In the near future, every NVIDIA GPU scientific supercomputer will be hybrid, tightly coupled with quantum processors to expand what is possible with computing,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “NVQLink is the Rosetta Stone connecting quantum and classical supercomputers — uniting them into a single, coherent system that marks the onset of the quantum-GPU computing era.”

    U.S. national laboratories, led by the Department of Energy, will use NVIDIA NVQLink to make new breakthroughs in quantum computing.

    “Maintaining America’s leadership in high-performance computing requires us to build the bridge to the next era of computing: accelerated quantum supercomputing,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “The deep collaboration between our national laboratories, startups and industry partners like NVIDIA is central to this mission — and NVIDIA NVQLink provides the critical technology to unite world-class GPU supercomputers with emerging quantum processors, creating the powerful systems we need to solve the grand scientific challenges of our time.”

    NVQLink connects the many approaches to quantum processors and control hardware systems directly to AI supercomputing — providing a unified, turnkey solution for overcoming the key integration challenges that quantum researchers face in scaling their hardware.

    With contributions from supercomputing centers, quantum hardware builders and quantum control system providers, NVQLink sets the foundation for uncovering the breakthroughs in control, calibration, quantum error correction and hybrid application development needed to run useful quantum applications.

    Researchers and developers can access NVQLink through its integration with the NVIDIA CUDA-Q™ software platform to create and test applications that seamlessly draw on CPUs and GPUs alongside quantum processors, helping ready the industry for the hybrid quantum-classical supercomputers of the future.

    Partners contributing to NVQLink include quantum hardware builders Alice & Bob, Anyon Computing, Atom Computing, Diraq, Infleqtion, IonQ, IQM Quantum Computers, ORCA Computing, Oxford Quantum Circuits, Pasqal, Quandela, Quantinuum, Quantum Circuits, Inc., Quantum Machines, Quantum Motion, QuEra, Rigetti, SEEQC and Silicon Quantum Computing — as well as quantum control system builders including Keysight Technologies, Quantum Machines, Qblox, QubiC and Zurich Instruments.

    Availability

    Quantum builders and supercomputing centers interested in NVIDIA NVQLink can sign up for access on this webpage.

    Learn more about how NVIDIA and partners are advancing AI innovation in the U.S. by watching the NVIDIA GTC Washington, D.C., keynote by Huang.

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  • Cushman & Wakefield Launches New Quantitative Insights Group to Advance Investor and Occupier Advisory Capabilities | US

    Cushman & Wakefield Launches New Quantitative Insights Group to Advance Investor and Occupier Advisory Capabilities | US

    NEW YORK, October 28, 2025 – Cushman & Wakefield (NYSE: CWK), a leading global real estate services firm, has announced a new Quantitative Insights Group, designed to advise institutional investor and occupier clients. Using advanced mathematics, statistics and our latest AI+ tools, the group will advise clients on capital allocation, investment decision-making and risk management at a portfolio and asset level.  

    The Quantitative Insights Group enhances Cushman & Wakefield’s existing platform of services throughout the asset lifecycle and strengthens its advisory capabilities, solidifying the firm’s expertise and deepening its ability to advise clients through complex market conditions. 

    Rebecca Rockey has been appointed Head of Quantitative Insights and Principal Economist, effective immediately. She will report to Toby Dodd, Chief Revenue Officer, Americas and lead a growing team of experts, including David Hoebbel, Greg Nelson and others.  
    “I’m pleased to lead the Quantitative Insights Group and advise our institutional investor and occupier clients as they navigate complex decisions with clarity and confidence,” said Rebecca Rockey, Head of Quantitative Insights and Principal Economist. “By integrating data and our latest AI+ tools, we’re building a powerful, forward-looking advisory engine that complements our already integrated service offerings.” 
    “This new team represents a strategic investment in our capabilities, connecting data platforms and insights to drive value for our clients,” said Toby Dodd, Chief Revenue Officer, Americas. “Rebecca’s leadership and economic expertise will be instrumental in shaping this effort and delivering impactful results.” 
    “The launch of this group is part of the ongoing evolution of our research, analysis and advisory capabilities,” said Brad Kreiger, Americas Co-Chief Executive. “By combining advanced analytics with our advisors’ deep market expertise, we will equip our clients with sharper tools to make data-driven decisions, optimize portfolios and navigate uncertainty with confidence.” 
    Under Rockey’s leadership, the Quantitative Insights Group will complement the firm’s existing client advisory strategies and further Cushman & Wakefield’s commitment to innovation, analytics and clients portfolio performance. Rockey is a recognized industry thought leader on macroeconomics and real estate and has been an instrumental leader in Cushman & Wakefield’s research agenda, including development of innovative studies like the recent Reimagining Cities, which confronted post-pandemic urban challenges, offering a blueprint for optimizing city real estate portfolios.

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  • US partners with Westinghouse, Cameco and Brookfield on $80B nuclear deployment

    US partners with Westinghouse, Cameco and Brookfield on $80B nuclear deployment

    Westinghouse Electric, Cameco and Brookfield Asset Management have entered into a strategic partnership with the U.S. government to deploy $80 billion in new nuclear reactors, the companies announced Tuesday.

    “Our administration is focused on ensuring the rapid development, deployment, and use of advanced nuclear technologies. This historic partnership supports our national security objectives and enhances our critical infrastructure,” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said in a statement,

    The deal calls for Westinghouse AP1000 reactors to be utilized in a deployment that will create more than 100,000 construction jobs, the companies said. “The program will cement the United States as one of the world’s nuclear energy powerhouses and increase exports of Westinghouse’s nuclear power generation technology globally.”

    According to the announcement, the partnership contains “profit sharing mechanisms” that allow all parties,  “including the American people,” to participate in the “long-term financial and strategic value that will be created within Westinghouse by the growth of nuclear energy and advancement of investment into AI capabilities in the United States.”

    Brookfield has more than half a trillion dollars invested in the critical infrastructure that underpins the U.S. economy, “and we expect to double that investment in the next decade as we deliver on building the infrastructure backbone of artificial intelligence,” Brookfield President Connor Teskey said in a statement.

    The U.S. is trying to rapidly bring power resources online to meet rising demand from data centers, and interest in nuclear is growing. Following a decade of stagnant growth, U.S. electricity demand will increase at a 2.5% compound annual growth rate through 2035, according to Bank of America Institute research published in July.

    “For all of the energy policy disagreements in Washington, one thing is clear: nuclear energy is the baseload electrical power source of the future,” said Thomas Ryan, a managing partner in K&L Gates’ energy, infrastructure and resources practice. “Its reliability, durability and sustainability have rendered its deployment an apolitical issue.”

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  • APM Terminals and Conductix-Wampfler sign third collaboration agreement

    APM Terminals and Conductix-Wampfler sign third collaboration agreement

    At a special ceremony on 28 October 2025, Conductix-Wampfler and APM Terminals signed a framework purchase agreement for rubber tire gantry crane (RTG) electrification products and terminal operations services.

    Grant Morrison, Global Head of Asset Category Management at APM Terminals, and François Bernès, Chief Executive Officer at Conductix-Wampfler signed the agreement in Shanghai

    The framework agreement was signed by François Bernès, Chief Executive Officer at Conductix-Wampfler and Grant Morrison, Global Head of Asset Category Management at APM Terminals. This was conducted at Conductix-Wampfler’s regional head office in Shanghai and marks the third collaboration agreement between the two companies.

    Over the past 14 years, Conductix-Wampfler has supplied APM Terminals with 413 energy supply systems for eRTGs (new and retrofitted) and 116 battery systems for its operations. The deployment of eRTGs with grid power supply or battery systems is a core initiative driving port decarbonisation. eRTGs eliminate carbon emissions at the source during yard operations, while the battery systems enable either full zero-emission operations (FE-RTG) or provide an optimal balance of reduced emissions and operational flexibility (Hybrid-RTG).

    François Bernès, Chief Executive Officer at Conductix-Wampfler, said, “This renewed partnership with APM Terminals provides Conductix-Wampfler with a strategic anchor and practical platform for our long-term vision. As a strategic partner, we will continue to fully support APM Terminals in achieving its energy-saving, emissions-reduction, and carbon-neutral goals, deeply engaging in the port operator’s decarbonisation journey and contributing our expertise to drive sustainable transformation in the industry.”

    As a leading global terminal operator, APM Terminals is working towards achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. Shifting from fossil-fuelled equipment in its ports to battery-electric container handling equipment is the main lever for reducing its scope 1 GHG emissions.  For its scope 2 emissions, the ambition is to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2030.

    APM Terminals has implemented large-scale “diesel-to-electric” conversions at multiple terminals worldwide, replacing diesel-powered yard cranes with electric-powered ones to reduce emissions at the source. It also actively deploys and utilises fully electric and hybrid port handling equipment and invests in renewable energy sources such as solar power to supply electricity to its terminals.

    Grant Morrison, Global Head of Asset Category Management, APM Terminals, commented, “This framework purchase agreement signifies our continued partnership with Conductix-Wampfler, which will contribute to delivering on our ambitious emissions reduction targets. We look forward to exploring more projects with Conductix-Wampfler as we work towards a more decarbonised future.”

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  • How Agentic AI is enabling autonomous systems to learn and grow

    How Agentic AI is enabling autonomous systems to learn and grow

    Learn about the difference between an AI agent and Agentic AI – and how a range of these solutions are transforming energy production.

     

    Agentic AI heralds a new era of artificial intelligence, where AI agents are the building blocks within an ‘agentic framework’. Agentic AI is a system that knows the goal of the user and operates using real-time data to coordinate a team of AI agents to achieve that desired aim. Here, Daniela George and Sebastiano Barbarino discuss what that means in the context of energy – and how they and their human teams are advancing Agentic AI for Baker Hughes customers. 

     

    Daniela George, Strategy & Business Development Director, Industrial Solutions, Baker Hughes

     

    “When I explain agentic AI, I talk about the entirety of the framework of what it means to act autonomously – to have these artificial intelligence systems that can think for themselves and can execute different tasks with minimal training or human intervention. As opposed to more traditional AI, which has predefined rules, Agentic AI perceives that context and thinks about reasons for next steps. 

    Agentic AI doesn’t just follow predefined rules; it reasons, adapts, and acts toward desired outcomes, including taking actions. Agentic AI will continuously reason its way through problems in order to achieve a certain task or goal. 

     

     

    Cordant™ is a modular, AI-enabled industrial enterprise solution that optimizes assets, processes, and energy use at scale. Acting as a digital thread across operations, Cordant™ automates decision-making, enhances reliability, and supports sustainability — elevating operational data from plant-level tools to strategic, enterprise-wide impact.

     

    In the context of what we do with Cordant™, Agentic AI is about helping operators of industrial facilities transform the way they work. From a Cordant™ standpoint, it’s about the operational transformation that has to happen on the autonomous workflow side. It’s about automating the daily processes that occur within a facility or a plant. It’s also about strategic agility in dashboarding, doing root-cause analysis faster, prioritizing alerts – all the things that are very manual today can have AI agents created within an Agentic AI framework that can accomplish those tasks autonomously. The result is freeing up human experts to do additional value-added tasks. 

    I’m on the Partnerships & Alliances team and we support the Cordant™ product and technology team by working with partners who help us identify opportunities to build these Agentic AI capabilities and ultimately achieve this transformation and agility.

    EFS_Oct2025_AgenticAI_Sebastiano
    Sebastiano Barbarino, Digital Production Solutions Leader, Baker Hughes

     

    Imagine each AI agent is there to automate a task that the engineers are doing. For example, the engineers sit down in the morning and see they need to fix a model – we create an agent that helps them do that. We also create an agent that follows up an engineer’s daily and weekly to-do lists. It even knows how to check for and verify impact.

    From those agents and others, you create a multi-agent system, which is able to talk between the agents. This collaboration between agents enhances the large language model’s (LLM) reasoning capabilities and reduces hallucinations. Agentic AI accelerates adoption of recommendations because it mimics human interaction dynamics. 

    Using A2A – agent to agent – protocol, we enable multiple agents to collaborate across different technology stacks even from different vendors or created by our own customers, to make more informed decisions. Agentic AI is when you put all these agents in a single infrastructure – a Model Context Protocol – MCP – and streamline their ability to connect with external tools and data sets. 

     

     

    Engineered to optimize oil and gas operations through AI-driven automation, real-time data integration, and smart decision-making, the Leucipa™ automated field production solution is the industry’s leading digital production software. With seamless field data connectivity, streamlined workflows, and actionable data insights and recommendations, Leucipa allows operators to take control of their operations across artificial lift, chemical management, power systems, and reservoir performance.

     

    The way we have been using AI in our Leucipa solution so far has been traditional AI, Machine Learning, and over the past couple of years, LLMs and GenAI like traditional chatbots but in the engineering context. Importantly, it has all been paired with our deep engineering physics. Our Leucipa Production Assistant – we call it ‘Lucy’ – has already been helping engineers make better decisions.

    EFS_Oct2025_AgenticAI_Lucy intro screen
    Introduction screen when setting up a new agent in the Leucipa platform

     

    Once ‘Lucy’ has made a recommendation and the human engineer has made a decision, we have now created an exception-based monitoring agent “to watch” whether the decision is leading to the expected results. For example, you have made a well intervention and you want to see if it is increasing or decreasing production. For a human to make that assessment, you would need the engineer to watch the screen constantly to monitor the production across thousands of wells. 

    EFS_Oct2025_AgenticAI_Lucy screen 2

     

    Using these GenAI agents an engineer can instruct it in natural language – across multiple languages – ‘I made this decision, and I expect this result: watch it for me’. The AI agent then runs 24/7 and comes back in due course to give the engineer recommendations on what can be done next to further optimize production. It doesn’t just show you problems, it refactors the solutions for you. One AI agent can watch thousands of wells across thousands of tasks. I can ask the same agent to check data quality across all those same wells every day. 

    EFS_Oct2025_AgenticAI Screen 3

     

     

    EFS_Oct2025_Agentic AI screen 3

     

    And that’s just an example of one agent. The beauty of Agentic AI is that it can bring multiple agents together to communicate and learn. This will further optimize processes in Enterprise applications via an Orchestrator agent to manage complex workflows utilizing AI agents with expertise in particular tasks or fields. The Orchestrator agent will oversee a team made up of both digital and human agents, with enhanced interoperability achieved by a new agent-to-agent communication protocol. 

     

     

    96% of enterprises plan to expand their use of agentic AI in the next 12 months. [cloudera.com]

    By 2034, the global agentic AI market could reach $200B, with financial services leading adoption. [tradersmagazine.com]

    Operational cost reductions of 30% and productivity gains of 20–60% are reported. [landbase.com]

     

    Rather than being personalized for each customer, Agentic AI needs to be customized to each type of persona – the type of user who is engaging with it. For example, with Cordant™ it could be an operator controlling the facility, a project manager, an engineer or even someone at an executive level. Those user personas are going to be wildly different in how they utilize Cordant™ and therefore they will have different needs from Agentic AI capabilities. Depending on a particular process in a facility there could be cases where it might be customized, but the most important aspect will be aligning the Agentic AI framework with the goals of the users, which are likely to be similar across customers.

    For example, let’s think about an operator with a goal of increasing the total production of a plant by 10%. Cordant™ has different pillars, such as Asset Health, Asset Strategy and Process Optimization. To manually accomplish that goal, even with some predefined traditional AI rules, would take a lot of time to analyze and iterate different scenarios. 

     

     

    Agentic AI capability allows the system to continuously learn and adapt. If you tweak one parameter of your processing facility – perhaps you increase the runtime of a certain pump, for example to see if you can get more production for a certain period of time without impacting your asset maintenance schedule or your strategy risk. Those are the kind of things that Agentic AI capability can automatically determine for an operator, as opposed to a traditional AI method that would hit a predefined rule and have to go back to the start to reassess. I see the biggest value to a user in the way Agentic AI can interrogate multiple agents to test how to reach those goals by tweaking different parameters. 

    Agentic AI can make different suggestions, including based on what it’s learning from the feedback it gets from the human users as well as the other AI agents. It can suggest parameters and tweaks that perhaps an operator had previously thought were too risky. Agentic AI can bring together vast amounts of data from across its network of agents and trigger deterministic calculations within its suite of MCP tools to safely generate results and deliver the goals.

    Another helpful case where Cordant™ is looking at Agentic AI as a reliability advisor where each AI agent will focus on one specific task – one for process optimization, one for asset strategy, one for asset health. Ultimately, they talk to one another to accomplish certain goals. Cordant™ allows for a plant to be interconnected in a way that has never happened before. It means you can generate more production without compromising maintenance or risking running equipment into the ground or causing other issues. All the AI agents have their expertise in each part and ultimately come together to make recommendations to transform operations from reactive to proactive through self-directed reasoning agents. 

     

    For Leucipa, we are already implementing early Agentic AI solutions with multiple customers to show the value, and it is growing very fast. The ability to use natural language – and multiple languages – will vastly change the way customers interact with our applications. They won’t need to navigate through dashboards to see KPIs and other information. Our agents will proactively tell you what the problems are and how you can fix them. It is more open and will be more efficient for our customers’ engineers – and will in turn enhance their job.

     

    It comes back to being able to move from manual tasks to more value-added types of work. A big part of adoption will be building trust in Agentic AI systems to allow them to make some of these decisions – the management of industrial facilities and plants is very demanding. Having a technology that can be a trusted assistant to advise and give well evidenced recommendations is very important and empowering.

    The challenge that any technology faces is building trust in users. If you don’t build trust, they will never use it even if they’ve bought it. That’s why Cordant™ calls our solution an advisor: we are not in the business of replacing the deep expertise that each customer has in their own company. We just want to help them make decisions faster, based on more and better data  which will  produce accurate evidence, diagnoses, and supporting recommendations, ultimately helping skilled engineers get to desired outcomes more quickly. 

     

    As Daniela says, it’s important to understand that this technology is not going to replace people. It is the other way around: this technology supports the engineers to make better decisions, faster and to make more decisions during the day around production optimization. That is the vision we have for Leucipa and Agentic AI. You cannot replace the engineering mind behind those decisions – the tools we are putting inside Leucipa – are not engineers. Agents are simply tools to aid better engineering decisions.

     

     

     

     

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  • The Profit of Preparedness: Resilience in Supply Chains, Finance, and AI

    The Profit of Preparedness: Resilience in Supply Chains, Finance, and AI

    After an unprecedented summer marked by intense heatwaves, devastating floods, and disrupted logistics, the concept of resilience has become more than just a theoretical idea; it’s now a critical concern for boardrooms and a balance-sheet question. The dialogue has evolved from simply asking, “How do we demonstrate responsibility?” to a more pressing question: “How can we accurately quantify and account for climate-related costs at the product level, rather than letting these costs slip through the cracks?”

    COP30 in Brazil stands out as a pivotal moment where global challenges and the need for a transition come into focus. The leaders keeping an eye on aren’t just those making sweeping promises, but rather those integrating resilience into their core business operations, across supply chains, finance, and with the help of AI.

    These three value drivers are where sustainability equals ROI:

    1. Supply chains, where your resilience is tested first

    Supply chains are where the operational reality of disruptions plays out. Shipment reroutes, altered deadlines, and rising raw material costs translate to balance sheets as premiums, downtime, and cashflow.

    Companies are feeling the impact: more than half of firms surveyed by Morgan Stanley experienced climate impacts on operations within the past year, including increased costs, worker disturbance, and revenue losses. BCG estimates that climate-related supply chain disruptions already cost companies an average of $182 million annually.

    These shocks are not abstract. When a drought shrank the River Rhine in 2022, shipping capacity fell by half, forcing costly reroutes for European manufacturers. US agribusiness faced similar disruptions when the Mississippi River levels dropped from 2022-2023, delaying exports and inflating logistics costs.

    As climate adaptation and mitigation climb up corporate priority lists, the agenda of today’s COO is shifting. Here’s my view on the key steps that unlock the real business value of sustainability:

    • Gain full visibility. Investing in tools that increase traceability and real-time awareness of emissions and resources is crucial; this will allow you to pinpoint vulnerabilities, diversify sourcing, strengthen transparency and anticipate risks before they escalate.
    • Link resilience metrics to measurable outcomes. Your value chain is your source of measurable sustainability value. Metrics that go beyond avoiding losses (i.e. reduced insurance premiums, increased operational agility, customer trust) turn this visibility into actionable insight. SAP Customer Nestlé has strengthened their resilience with real-time, connected operations across its global supply chain with a cloud-first environment and integrated analytics.

    With tools in place and metrics aligned to outcomes, COOs can optimize value chains beyond just efficiency: diversifying suppliers in geographies with higher exposure to disruptions, building redundancy where needed, and securing future advantage.

    Resilience isn’t just defensive. A supply chain that adapts faster than your competitors’ is a growth driver. Redesigned value chains and networks transform risk management into a source of long-term ROI, and sustainability data is an untapped lever.

    2. Finance, the place climate risk becomes line-item reality

    If supply chains are where vulnerabilities show up operationally, finance is where they land with impact and finality. Today’s CFO cannot steer the business on carbon numbers alone. Making this shift means answering questions like:

    • “How do we integrate sustainability data into the same systems that manage profit centers, cost centers, and balance sheets?” Many disclosures still rely on proxy data, such as industry averages, which can result in deviations of 30-40% or more from real values. SAP Green Ledger  brings granular carbon insights into core finance processes, enabling organizations to drive decarbonization and operationalize sustainability at scale. This means companies can understand not only how much carbon they emit, but also how it affects risk exposure and margins.
    • “How do we measure progress toward decarbonization goals to strengthen our position in carbon-sensitive markets?” Those with verifiable sustainability data have preferential access to capital. Sustainable bonds and loans surpassed $1.6 trillion in 2024 as demonstrable decarbonization strategies often lowered financing costs.

    Companies that treat sustainability data as a financial asset, connected to auditable accounting principles, are transforming sustainability from a compliance exercise into a growth driver.

    The organizations that get this right are already lowering the cost of capital and outperforming their peers.

    3. AI, your resilience accelerator

    AI plus sustainability is a classic ROI equation. One type of return on investment is how much better you get at predicting physical climate risk, then prepare and respond with speed and agility. According to McKinsey, AI (especially generative AI) could generate $2.6 to $4.4 trillion annually in economic benefits, and up to $6.1 to $7.9 trillion when considering full productivity impact across industries.

    However, there is a gap between AI adoption and opportunity. According to Accenture, only 14% of companies today are using AI to reduce their carbon emissions, but 65% believe they will do this in the future.

    Opportunities for AI adoption to drive ROI and drive competitive advantage are huge:

    AI streamlines supplier data, automatically handles permits, and reduces compliance costs. SAP capabilities such as AI-assisted permit management and AI-assisted compliance information processing improve speed and accuracy of information extraction and processing, while AI-assisted ESG report generation allows you to report on your progress in minutes. Automotive industry company Martur Fompak has used business AI to achieve a 52% reduction in transportation-related carbon emissions and to calculate carbon footprints more than 50 times faster. Another example is msg Global Solutions AG, whose Greenwashing Detector solution leverages generative AI to validate reports and detect potential greenwashing.

    Unlock enterprise-wide intelligence for long-term ROI

    For companies that go a step further to deeply ingrain AI implementation, AI contextualizes and integrates sustainability data across ERP systems to inform decisions on risk, resilience, and opportunity. Tools like AI-enabled supplier validation, AI-powered emissions factor mapping, and AI-assisted carbon emission analysis help identify risk and opportunity so that you can act on sustainability across the enterprise. This drives both day-to-day operations, like smarter procurement, as well as long-term strategy, like identifying and reducing emissions at the source.

    In times of disruption, the early mover captures the value. AI isn’t just an efficiency tool, but a proactive warning system enabling you to see risk sooner, act faster, and optimize better.

    Climate risk doesn’t live in theory. It shows up in supply chains, operations, and increasingly, line items on financial statements. Resilience is no longer just a safeguard, but a source of growth, efficiency, and competitive edge. 

    At COP30, leaders across different industries are preparing for a new normal, focusing on managing environmental, regulatory, and market risks as their top investment priorities.

    More information about SAP Sustainability can be found here.

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  • Brits go big on holidays abroad, spending almost £3,000 on a once in a lifetime trip

    Brits go big on holidays abroad, spending almost £3,000 on a once in a lifetime trip

    • Research by Aviva reveals just under half (49%) of Brits have been on a once in a lifetime trip, spending an average of £2,807 per person[1]
    • Beach holidays prove to be the most popular for such occasions (25%), but a handful (6%) of travellers have visited somewhere considered unsafe or dangerous
    • Brits are also celebrating milestone events abroad – with almost half (49%) spending a birthday abroad or planning to do so in the future
    • Despite this, 11% of those travelling this year do not plan to purchase travel insurance[2]

    New research by Aviva reveals that Brits are prepared to go big on trips abroad, with almost half (49%) having been on a trip of a lifetime, at an average cost of £2,807 per person.

    And for some, these special trips aren’t a one off as one in 10 (10%) have been on three ‘once in a lifetime trips’ or more, spending as much as £3,040 on their most recent trip.

    Beach holidays (25%) prove to be the most popular for once in a lifetime trips, followed by city breaks, touring holidays and cruises (all 15%) and trips to theme parks/ adventure parks (12%). The research also reveals that a handful of people (6%) may have an appetite for so-called ‘shock tourism’, having deliberately visited somewhere unsafe or high-risk, such as a location with a live volcano.

    The research also reveals that Brits are prepared to go all out celebrating milestones abroad. According to the findings, almost half (49%) have either travelled abroad – or are planning to – for a birthday, at an estimated average cost of £1,606 per person.

    Europe tops the list for birthday celebrations, with Spain being the most popular country, followed by Greece, Italy and France. However, the United States also proves to be a well-liked destination, with a handful of travellers heading to further afield destinations such as Ghana, Fiji, Kenya, Malawi, Tobago, and Costa Rica.

    Although birthdays prove to be the most common reason for celebrating abroad, the data also reveals that Brits are heading overseas for family reunions (34%), other people’s weddings (32%) and anniversaries (31%).

    Milestone moment

    Percentage who have either travelled abroad for this moment or plan to do so in the future

    Average spend / planned spend[3]

    A birthday

    49%

    £1,606

    A family reunion or trip

    34%

    £1,813

    A wedding (someone else’s)

    32%

    £1,681

    An anniversary

    31%

    £1,844

    A sporting event

    29%

    £1,492

    A music or arts event

    27%

    £1,440

    A sabbatical or extended holiday

    24%

    £2,226

    A religious event or festival

    22%

    £1,694

    A wedding (your own)

    22%

    £2,605

    End of exams or graduation

    21%

    £1,528

    To take part in a sporting event

    19%

    £1,668

    Renewing wedding vows

    19%

    £1,879

    A gap year

    18%

    £1,879

    Retirement (out of those aged 66 and older)

    17%

    £1,901

    A birth or adoption of a baby

    16%

    £1,973

    A babymoon

    15%

    £1,791

    Any holiday, whether it’s to celebrate a birthday, anniversary or even retirement, is exciting. While we hope everything goes smoothly, life events such as illness, injury or even being called up for jury service can impact our ability to travel, which is why travel insurance is so important.

    Travellers are also willing to invest in other major life events, spending an average of £2,605 on their own wedding, £2,226 on sabbaticals or extended holidays, and £1,973 on the birth or adoption of a child.

    Despite this, 11% of those who are planning to travel this year do not plan to take out travel insurance[2].

    James Devereux, Travel Manager at Aviva, says: “It’s interesting to see that Brits are taking the chance to go abroad for those once in a lifetime trips or milestone moments.

    “Any holiday, whether it’s to celebrate a birthday, anniversary or even retirement, is exciting. While we hope everything goes smoothly, life events such as illness, injury or even being called up for jury service can impact our ability to travel, which is why travel insurance is so important.

    “Not only does it provide cover in the event you need to cancel your trip, it can also protect you while you’re away if you’re unfortunate enough to fall ill and require medical assistance or other support. Travel insurance can give you that much needed peace of mind while celebrating a special time.

    “However, it is worrying that some travellers are visiting destinations that are deemed dangerous or high risk – otherwise known as ‘shock tourism’. If the government advises against all travel, but you choose to go anyway, you wouldn’t be able to make a claim in the event you needed medical assistance, for example. With medical bills in some countries costing tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of pounds, it’s important to check the FCDO website before you travel.”

    Aviva’s dos and don’ts for ‘once in a lifetime’ and milestone holidays:

    DO check your policy for a maximum trip limit – If you are looking to go on a sabbatical or extended holiday, be sure to check your travel insurance as there is usually a limit on the number of consecutive days covered. In many instances, this is usually around 31 days, although policy extensions can usually be added at a fee.

    DO double check you’re covered for any activities planned – Some holidaymakers might be planning something special for their milestone trip, which may not be covered by standard travel insurance policies.

    DON’T travel without declaring any medical conditions – Be sure to inform your insurer about any existing or ongoing medical conditions, whether they relate to you or anyone else covered by the policy. Some insurers may also require you to update them if your health changes between the time you purchase the policy, book your trip and leave for your holiday. As requirements can differ between providers, it’s always wise to check directly with your insurer if you’re unsure.

    DON’T travel against government travel advice – If the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) advises against all travel, but you decide to travel anyway, you probably wouldn’t be able to make a claim should you require things like medical treatment or assistance while abroad. Though it may sound obvious, rules change frequently, so it’s worth keeping an eye on both the government website and any local government services for any particular advice before you travel.

    DO check the policy limit – If you’re planning on spending thousands on a dream holiday, it’s a good idea to double-check your policy limit – which is the maximum amount an insurer will pay for claims covered – to ensure that it provides the right level of cover in the event you need to cancel your trip. Policy limits will range across insurers, so if unsure, always contact your insurer directly.

    DO check entry requirements – Under new rules, British passport owners may have to prove that they have travel insurance and a return ticket when crossing the border. Failing to have the correct documentation or visa – and being denied entry as a result – wouldn’t be covered under most travel insurance policies. Before booking your trip, it’s worth checking the FCDO website.

    DO keep a copy of your insurance provider’s emergency details – Travel insurers are there to help you in the case of an unforeseen event – which includes things like cancelled flights and medical emergencies. Though no one wants to think of the worst-case scenario, it pays to be prepared.

    -ends-

    References:

    1. The research was conducted by Censuswide, among a sample of 2001 UK Respondents (Nat Rep 16+). The data was collected between 14.05.2025-16.05.2025. Censuswide abides by and employs members of the Market Research Society and follows the MRS code of conduct and ESOMAR principles. Censuswide is also a member of the British Polling Council. £2,807 statistic is per person. [↑]

    2. Aviva’s How We Live Report 2025 – The underlying research was conducted by Censuswide between 8 and 15 November 2024, via a survey of 4,000 nationally representative respondents across the UK (aged 16+). [↑]

    3. Average cost calculated by taking mean costs for those who have already travelled overseas for these events and mean planned costs for those who plan to travel overseas. [↑]

    Enquiries:

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  • Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan: Scaling Beyond Moore’s Law to Million-GPU Clusters

    Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan: Scaling Beyond Moore’s Law to Million-GPU Clusters

    Introduction

    Michael Kagan: One of the interesting things about Nvidia is the culture of win-win, okay? We are not after taking a bigger piece of the existing pie. We are after baking a bigger pie for everybody, and the success—our success is our customer’s success. Our success is not the failure of our competition. Our success is success of our customers and success of the ecosystem.

    And I think fusing together conventional computing, von Neumann machines and accelerated computing that are provided with Nvidia, it’s probably opened yet another dimension that I’m not sure what it is, but it basically gives—you know, on the practical short-term view is it gives Nvidia and Intel channels to the market, or expanding the market and serving the markets that otherwise was more challenging.

    Sonya Huang:  We are delighted to hear today from one of the legends of the semiconductor industry, Michael Kagan, the CTO of Nvidia. Michael was formerly Chief Architect at Intel and later co-founder and CTO of Mellanox, which Nvidia acquired for $7 billion in March 2019. Since then, Michael has been a major driver of Nvidia’s dominance as the AI compute platform—thanks in large part to Mellanox’s interconnect technology, which has been key to pushing chips beyond Moore’s Law.

    The AI race is ultimately a silicon race—to squeeze the most intelligence possible out of each unit of silicon. Michael takes us on a journey through how the compute frontier has evolved: from packing more transistors onto a single chip to connecting thousands—or even hundreds of thousands—of chips into a unified fabric across an AI data center.

    Michael has been advancing the compute frontier for more than four decades, and we’re honored to have him on today’s show.

    Full Conversation

    Pat Grady: Okay. We’re here with Michael Kagan, the CTO of Nvidia, currently the world’s most valuable company. Michael, thank you for joining us.

    Michael Kagan: Thank you. My pleasure.

    Pat Grady: So I thought where we could start—our partner Shaun likes to make the case about every six months that Nvidia would not be Nvidia without Mellanox. Mellanox was a company that you co-founded some 25 years ago, and have been a part of through this day. So can you kind of paint that picture for us? Why is it that the Mellanox acquisition was so critical to Nvidia?

    Michael Kagan: You know, there was a huge transition in the world in terms of computing and the need for computing. And it grows, grows exponentially. And one of the things that we usually estimate linearly, but the world was exponential. And exponential growth now is actually accelerated. It used to be like Moore’s Law, which is basic silicon, and it was twice every other year. And regardless, the discussion that Moore’s Law in terms of physics is not quite running anymore.

    Once the AI kicked in, which was in 2010, 2011—kicked in when GPU from graphic processing unit became general processing unit, actually, that’s running workloads where for the first time the AI workload was run on the GPU, taking advantage of the programmability and parallel nature of this machine. The requirements for performance started to grow at a much higher coefficient, so the models started to go up in terms of size and capacity 2X every three months, which requires now 10X or 16X a year performance growth, versus old school of twice every other year.

    And in order to grow this scale, you need to innovate, and you need to develop solutions at a much higher scale than just basic components. And that’s where the network kicks in, that’s where the network is. And there’s multiple layers of scaling performance that requires high speed networks and high performance networks.

    The one is what we call scale up. Basically if you’re going back to the CPU days, scaling up was more [inaudible], more transistors, and also some advances in the microarchitecture like out-of-order execution and at some point multicore and so on and so forth. But so this is the basic building block of computing. In the GPU world, the basic building block is the GPU. And in order to scale it up more than you can do on a single piece of silicon with a lot of advances that we are doing with the microarchitecture and advanced technologies, we actually need to do something on the scale of—on the sort of multicore CPU, but a much larger scale. And that’s what we are doing with NVLink. This is a scale-up solution. So our GPU, what we call GPU today, is a rock-sized machine. You need a forklift to lift it. So, you know, if you order just GPU on Amazon, just don’t wonder that you’ll show up this huge rack of …

    Pat Grady: Yeah, people think chip, but it’s really a system.

    Michael Kagan: Right. Right. And that’s just one GPU, okay? So basic building block, a very basic computer that application software is running on is this GPU. And it is not just silicon, it’s not just hardware, it’s not just wires, but there is also software layer that exposes CUDA as the API. And that’s what actually enables it to pretty much seamlessly scale. I’m simplifying a little bit the story, but seamlessly scale from one component that used to be a single GPU all the way up to 72, maintaining the same software interface.

    And once you get this building block as big as it conceivably can be built in terms of power, cost, efficiency, then you start scaling out. And to scale out, it means you take many of these building blocks, connect them together, and now on the algorithm level, on the application level, you actually split your application to multiple pieces running in parallel on these big machines.

    Pat Grady: Mm-hmm.

    Michael Kagan: And that’s again where the network comes in. And so if you talk about scale up, we basically made memory like domain to go beyond single compute node and a single GPU. And that’s actually the first thing where Mellanox technology comes in, because before the Mellanox acquisition, the scaling up of Nvidia with the NVLink was limited to a single node machine. Going outside of single compute node, if the 72 GPUs are—it’s actually 36 computers, each one has two GPUs and they’re wired together, so present all this as a single GPU—getting connectivity outside of the signal node, it’s not just plugging in the wire to the connector. It’s a lot of software, it’s a lot of technology within the network, how to make multiple nodes to work as the single machine. And that’s where Mellanox first just immediate in terms of the way we go upstream. That’s the first one.

    The second one is how do you split the operation across multiple machines? And the way to do it, if I have a task that it takes one GPU to do one second, if I want to accelerate it, I split it to 10, to, you know, a thousand pieces, and send each piece to a different GPU. And now in one millisecond, I get done whatever I was doing in the second. But, you know, you need to communicate this partial job split, split the task, then you need to consolidate the results. And every time you are—and you run this, you know, multiple times, you have multiple iterations or multiple applications running, so that there is a part of it doing communication and part of it doing computation.

    Now the thing is that you want to split it into as many pieces as you possibly can, because that’s your speed-up factor. But then if your communication is actually blocking you, you waste time, you waste energy, you waste everything. So what you need to do is you need to has a very fast communication. So you split it into many, many pieces, and so each piece takes very little time. But then there is another piece that is communicated, and you need to fit it at this time. So that’s just pure bandwidth.

    And another thing is that when you tune your application, you tune your application so that communication can be hidden behind computation. And it means that if communication for some reason gets longer, then everybody waits. So it means that what you need to do in the network, you need to have not only just raw performance, like what’s called hero numbers, you know, I can get to that many gigabits per second. I also need to make sure that no matter who communicates to whom, the latency, the time it takes, the distribution is very narrow.

    So if you look at other network technologies or other network products, you know, you go to the HERO numbers, you know, sending beat from one place to another, it’s basically physics.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: It’s pretty much close to everyone. You know, we are a little bit better, but that’s not the big advantage. But when you do it thousands of times and it takes the same time to do it, versus a very wide distribution of other technologies, then the machine becomes less efficient. So instead of being able to split your job to a thousand GPUs, you can split it only to ten GPUs, because you need to accommodate for the jitter on the network within the computation phase.

    So inherently, network determines the performance of this cluster. And we look at this data center as basically a single unit of computing.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: Okay? Single unit computing means that you look at this, you start architecting your components, your software and your hardware at the point where this is the data center, this is 100,000 GPUs that we want to make them work together. We need to make multiple chips, compute chips, two, network chips, five. Okay, so this is the scale just in terms of what’s the impact and what’s the investment you need to make to create this single unit of computing. So that’s where Mellanox technology came in.

    And another aspect of this is we talked about a network that connects the GPUs to run the task. But there is another side of this machine which is customer facing. So this machine needs to serve multiple tenants, and this machine needs to run an operating system. Every computer runs an operating system. Another part of the Mellanox technologies is what we call BlueField DPU, a data processing unit which is actually the computing platform to run the operating system of the data center.

    In a conventional computer you have a CPU that runs an operating system and runs application software. And there are many things we can talk about, you know, the advantage versus disadvantage. But there are two key things: one is how much time do you spend on your general purpose computing to run the application? You want to maximize it. And another thing is how do you isolate your infrastructure computing from the application computing? Because, you know, viruses and the cyber attacks and so on and so forth. And being able to run infrastructure computing on a different computing platform actually reduces significantly the attack front especially in the side channel attacks, versus what happens if you run it on the same computer.

    If you remember there was a five or six—well actually, more than almost 10 years ago there was this meltdown and all these cyber attacks of the side channel on CPUs, and this cannot happen, or the attack surface is reduced significantly when you run the different—so on the other side of the network we have also technology. So that’s what makes the data center to be more efficient. And I—well, I may be not objective, but I do agree that this merger of Mellanox and Nvidia, it actually goes both ways. I don’t think that the networking business of, now it’s Nvidia, previously Mellanox, could have been growing that significantly as it grew. Now I think we are the fastest growing ethernet business, you know, let alone NVLink and InfiniBand, but just ethernet business is the fastest-growing business ever.

    Sonya Huang: What are the things that break as you get to 100,000, maybe eventually a million GPU clusters? And how do you use software to help design around that?

    Michael Kagan: It’s a multi-stage challenge, okay? One of the things that you need to keep in mind, and it’s not very obvious for all the engineers, that when you design the machine or think how to operate it, well, you know, you have these components and they are working and now just let’s figure out. Okay, so the thing is that the hardware component works at 99.999-whatever percent of the time, and it’s usually okay if you are dealing with a single box with a couple of them.

    But if you are building a 100,000 component machine or a 100 GPUs machine, which means in terms of components, there is millions of them, the chance that everything works is zero. So something is definitely broken, and you need to design it both from hardware and from software perspective to keep going, to keep going as efficiently as you can, to keep, you know, your performance, you keep your power efficiency and of course keep the service running. So this is challenge number one even before you go to millions. This challenge actually starts at, you know, a few tens of thousands. And that’s number one.

    Number two is when you are running these workloads, it is really important to—sometimes you run a single job on the entire data center, and then you need to write the software and you need to provide all the interfaces to the software to place the different parts of the jobs more efficiently.

    Building networks at this scale is a very different story than building—compute network on this scale is a very different story than building just a general purpose data center network. A general purpose data center network is ethernet. It’s not a big deal—well, it is a big deal, but it is a different deal. You are serving, you know, loosely coupled collaborative microservices that create the service that you see as a customer from outside. Here you are running one single application on 100,000 machines, and they need to …

    Pat Grady: Is that specific to training workloads, or is that also true with inference workloads?

    Michael Kagan: It’s true for everything. It depends to what scale. And the inference is yet another topic that we [inaudible]. Until recently, training was the key thing, you know, a lot of GPUs. And there was a very specific way of training that was being done. You basically copy this with another model on multiple machines or multiple sets of machines and run them, then consolidate the results and so on and so forth.

    On the inference, the story is a little bit different, but the thing is that you need to provide the hooks on the hardware and on your low level system software for application and for scheduler to place the job and place the different parts of the job in the most efficient way. And as long as your machine fits in a building, which is about 100,000 GPUs, now we’re talking about a gigawatt, it’s all power driven, then you are here.

    But the problem is—the challenge is that for many reasons you want to split your workloads across multiple data centers. And sometimes data centers are at a distance of many kilometers, many miles. It may be across the continent. And this comes with yet another challenge, which is the speed of light.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: Okay, now the latency variance between different parts of your machine is dramatically different. And what is even more challenging is that when you talk about networks, the congestion on the network is one of the key problems that deteriorates network performance. And managing congestion across such a latency difference, it’s not like, you know, in the old telco days you put some box at the edge of your data center with a huge buffer and it’s a shock absorber for congestion. A huge buffer  is not good. You know, bigger is not better. There is a famous statement from a very famous woman.

    And these buffers are basically, or these devices are basically to isolate the external world from the internals. But when you want to run a single workload across data centers that are distant by kilometers, you need to have every machine on one side to be aware. But whom does it communicate to, whether it’s short communication, long communication, and adjust all the communication patterns accordingly, so you don’t need these big buffers. Because big buffers is a jitter.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: And so we have a technology, we actually developed it recently, a technology, all of our ethernet network is Spectrum X. This is the device that we designed and developed based on the Spectrum switch that we put on the edge of the data center. And it provides all the information and telemetry needed for the endpoints to adjust for the congestion.

    Sonya Huang: Can we talk a little bit more about training versus inference? Like, how does the shape of workload differ when you’re doing, I guess, back prop is a lot more computationally intensive, forward pass less so. But how does the workload differ? And then are you seeing customer demand start to shift from pre-training towards inference, or do you think it’s still very training heavy right now?

    Pat Grady: And if I could just ask a quick follow-up question with that. Will people be running inference workloads on the same data centers that they use for training, or will these end up being two separate—because they’re different optimizations, people end up using two different sets of data centers?

    Michael Kagan: Okay. Yeah, that’s a great question, and let me start with the first one. So training has two phases. One is inference, which is just for the propagation and then back propagation to adjust the weights. And for data parallel training, it’s yet another phase to consolidate the results of the weights update across multiple model copies.

    So until recently it was the main driver of the compute, because until not very long ago—it’s maybe two years, which is ages in the AI era—the inference or AI was mainly perceptional. So you show the picture, that’s a dog. You show the photo of the person, and here that’s Michael and that’s Sonya. And so that’s a single path and that’s it.

    Then came generative AI, where actually you get the recursive generation. So when you pause the prompt, then it’s not just one inference, it’s many inferences. Because for every token, when you generate text or generate picture, for every new token, you need to go through the entire machine all over again. So instead of one-shot [inaudible] and then there is more. And then now there is reasoning, which means machine starts, you know, sort of thinking. Okay? If you ask me what time is it now, I can tell you. It’s easy, right? What time is it now? But if you ask me a more complicated question, then I need to think, I probably need to wait or compare multiple solutions or multiple paths, and every such a thing is inference.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: Every such thing is inference. And inference itself has actually two phases. One is much more compute intensive, and the other one is memory intensive. It’s what we call prefill. Because when you do the inference, you have some sort of background, which is prompt, which is some relevant data that you need to process and create the context to generate the answer. And this is very compute intensive, it’s not much memory intensive.

    And the other part is actually generating the answer, which is the decode part of the inference where you generate token by token, okay? Well, there are some technologies that you can generate more than one token, but it’s still a single path is much less than the final answer.

    So if you combine all these things together, inference demand for computing is actually not less than training, it’s actually even more. And there are two reasons for this. One is that what I explained, that there’s much more computing than it used to be for the inference. The other thing is you train a model once, but you infer many times. You know, ChatGPT, billions of people—or it’s almost billions of people. Customers, they are pounding them all the time in the same model. They trained it once.

    Sonya Huang: And now making videos. Now they’re making videos.

    Michael Kagan: Right. Right. Now they’re making videos and you can generate, and then, you know, everybody is doing the inference. My wife, I think she talks to ChatGPT more than to me these days. Once she discovered this, that’s her best friend. Now to your question about machines. You can infer on the phone, okay? So there is definitely going to be much smaller scale installations for inference. It’s like mobile devices. If you look at the data center scale, at the data center scale and its efficiency of the programming, the programmability is much more viable than optimizations for hardware. And, you know, every hardware instance, it has its own cost and its own drawback. So as long as you don’t identify—and I don’t think besides, you know, this—we actually did—it’s a very similar GPU. It’s the same programming model as a GPU for prefill versus decode. I think—I don’t remember when it happened, but actually we announced that we are building the GPU SKU that is optimized for prefill. So you will have—it can do decode, and decode GPU can do prefill, but you can equip your data center with the SKUs or the prefill with the SKUs that are for decode to optimize for typical use. But if your workload shifts for more decode or for more prefill, you can use either one of them to compensate. And this is the importance of programmability. The same interfaces for GPUs, it’s based on CUDA and up, which is—that’s what made Nvidia. Nvidia before Mellanox.

    Pat Grady: Yeah. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about data center scaling? So for many decades we had Moore’s Law, and chips got more and more dense and produced better and better performance. And then we ran into the laws of physics, and chips just couldn’t get more dense because their quantum mechanical properties caused them to break down. And so then we had to scale up to the rack level and now we got to scale out to the data center level. Is there some analogous law of data center scaling that says when data centers get too big the communication overhead causes the performance to break down? Or just said differently or maybe said more simply: Is there a natural limit to how big data centers can get?

    Michael Kagan: I think there is a practical limit of how much energy you can consume within the given size of the data center.

    Pat Grady: If you were surrounded by nuclear power plants and the energy was available, would the data center itself perform?

    Michael Kagan: I don’t know. I’m not an expert in the construction. But if you surround, there’s energy coming in, now the heat is going out. So there is a whole—we are now basically moved pretty much entirely to the liquid cooling. And one of the reasons we did it is to enable much denser compute power. We couldn’t build as dense computing as we’re building now with air cooling.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: So there’s a whole bunch of technologies coming to help this more and more denser. Now the last big data center which is like XAI scale is 100 or 150 megawatt. Now we’re talking about gigawatt data centers, people are talking about 10 gigawatt data centers. So, you know, looking forward to building much bigger data centers.

    Sonya Huang: Are you sending the data centers to outer space?

    Pat Grady: Pretty cool.

    Michael Kagan: I think—well, one of the things that determines the speed of data center deployment is you know, how fast concrete gets stable.

    Pat Grady: [laughs]

    Sonya Huang: So before starting Mellanox, you were at Intel.

    Michael Kagan: That’s right.

    Sonya Huang: Sixteen years?

    Michael Kagan: Sixteen years.

    Sonya Huang: Became chief architect. Nvidia and Intel recently announced a partnership. Can you share a little bit about what the vision for that might be?

    Michael Kagan: You know, the starting point is that computing changed in the last decade, or a little bit more than a decade. Nvidia started as the accelerated computing company. Video games was the first. And then it evolved to AI, which is the new way of data processing. So you cannot just—General von Neumann machine just is not capable of being used as a platform to solve the problem like, you know, programming when a machine is just explaining to somebody what to do. Okay, I can explain many things and I can explain to many people what to do, but I can’t explain how to distinguish between cat and dog, right?

    So there are new challenges that AI solves, and you need acceleration there. And our partnership with Intel is actually fusing accelerated computing with the general purpose computing. Because general purpose computing is not going away. Everything will be accelerated, but we accelerate the general purpose computing, we accelerate the applications. And x86 is the architecture that is dominant there, and it would serve greatly both companies.

    That’s actually one of the interesting things about Nvidia is the culture of win-win, okay? We are not after taking a bigger piece of the existing pie. We are after baking a bigger pie for everybody, and the success—our success is our customer’s success. Our success is not the failure of our competition. Our success is success of our customers and success of the ecosystem.

    And I think fusing together conventional computing, von Neumann machines and accelerated computing that are provided with Nvidia, it’s probably opened yet another dimension that I’m not sure what it is, but it basically gives—you know, on the practical short-term view is it gives Nvidia and Intel channels to the market, or expanding the market and serving the markets that otherwise was more challenging.

    Pat Grady: You mentioned the culture of Nvidia. So when Mellanox became part of Nvidia in 2019, the market cap of the combined company was about $100 billion—which is no joke. But the market cap today is about $4.5 trillion. And so 45x growth in value in six years is pretty phenomenal. How has that changed the culture of Nvidia? How is Nvidia different today now that it’s one of the most admired companies in the world, if not the most admired, versus six years ago?

    Michael Kagan: Yeah. About this, you know, when we just joined, Jensen was in Israel, and I presented him, you know, that I believe that one plus one will be ten. And I actually was off by a factor of four.

    Pat Grady: [laughs]

    Michael Kagan: But, you know, Mellanox and Nvidia in a sense it’s sort of similar, the culture is very similar to begin with, but there are some—there’s nothing absolutely similar. And I was the only founder that left Mellanox after Eyal resigned a few months after the acquisition. And my main focus in the beginning, you know, were things that you think about in the shower, was how to make sure that this acquisition will succeed.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: You know, Nvidia paid $7 billion for a company that I founded and, you know, with all the mixed feelings that were there. But once it’s done, it’s done. Now I have to make it successful. So eventually it worked.

    Sonya Huang: [laughs]

    Michael Kagan: Most of the Israeli employees stayed. I think it’s 85 or 90 percent of the original employees stayed. Actually, Nvidia grew more than 2x in Israel in terms of manpower.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: So we’re growing, and we are announcing that we are actually going to build a campus in Israel, a new campus for Nvidia. And so that’s where I think overall the merger was very successful. I did my best to make sure it succeeds. And besides the technology that I was looking at, this part of which is sort of technology, but it’s technology and theology, and there is many other things to make sure that people are comfortable from being in the center of Mellanox, which is the headquarters on Israel, don’t feel left somewhere in the far away with the—and Jensen basically emphasizes the networking is the critical part of Nvidia’s success.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: And he’s right. So I think it was the—it’s considered to be the most successful measure in the history of the technology. You guys probably track the things better than I am, but overall I think it was a great move.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: Looking backwards.

    Sonya Huang: What are the science fiction things that you spend your time thinking about? I was just even wondering, like, for example, optical interconnects. Do you think that will exist? Do you think AI will ever be better at physics than us and better at data center design than us?

    Michael Kagan: Well, what I’m thinking, you know, if you look at science fiction, is how to make history to be experimental science. You can, in physics, try something and then see if it works and then try something else. In history, time goes one direction, but you have a good simulation of the world. [inaudible] And we have an Earth 2 climate simulator. And with this type of technology, we can actually simulate how what we do today will impact the global warming 50 years from now, okay? So experimental science, you know, you try something, you see what happens 50 years later.

    So that’s the science fiction part. And, you know, the physics? Now we are moving from reasoning and so on and so forth. Now once we get AI models to understand physics, we actually can learn physics. AI can teach us physics because the way we get to the laws of physics that we observe—theoretical physics—you observe some phenomena, and you generalize it and you compose the rule that’s basically the law, the physics law that stays underneath this phenomena. And AI is really great at generalizing and data processing and observing, so AI can help us to get to know some laws of physics that we don’t even imagine now.

    Sonya Huang: Okay, so Huang’s law was 2x every two years. Huang plus Kagan’s law is, what is the slope and how long do you think you can sustain it?

    Michael Kagan: Well, the slope is somewhere in the range of 10x or a few orders of magnitude a year.

    Sonya Huang: Okay.

    Michael Kagan: And that’s what we are doing by the way now, since about two or three years ago we accelerated our product introduction from every other year to every year. Now we introduce a new wave of products every year, and it’s an order of magnitude higher performance. And it’s not on the cheap level performance, it’s on the machine that you can build with this performance. That’s what we are looking at, it’s a single unit of computing.

    And how long it will stay, I don’t know. I don’t know. But we’ll do our best to maintain it as long as needed and probably even accelerate. It’s all about exponent. It’s all about exponent. It’s hard to imagine. You know, if you look at this Moulay curves or any role curves, they usually plot it on the logarithmic scale so it looks like linear. But that’s the wrong thing to look at. When I’m showing this [inaudible]. So it’s just like this, you know—boom! And a year later it’s the same—boom! You know, you can’t predict what’s going to happen. Who could predict that when iPhone was first introduced or smartphone was first introduced, you know, it’s 15 years ago?

    Pat Grady: 2007.

    Michael Kagan: Yeah, 2007. Oh, 17 years ago. Okay, who could imagine that this smartphone, the least-used function, at least for me, is the phone.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: Unless it’s e-commerce, it’s texting, it’s news, it’s mail, it’s basically running your life from this machine. It’s your authentication, your ID is there. So, you know, now who can imagine what’s going to happen, you know, 10 years from now with all these developments that we are doing today? But we are building the platform for innovation.

    Pat Grady: What is your commentary on who can imagine—notwithstanding, what is the most optimistic view of our future with AI that you like to think about? Like, what could AI do for the world five, ten, fifteen years from now?

    Michael Kagan: The thing is that Steve Jobs called the computer to be the bicycle of mind.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: Okay? So AI is—it’s maybe, I don’t know if it’s—it’s probably a spaceship.

    Pat Grady: [laughs]

    Michael Kagan: Because there’s a lot of things that I would like to do, but I just don’t have enough time, don’t have enough resources to do it. With AI, I will have it. And it doesn’t mean that, you know, I will do twice as much. Maybe I will do 10 times as much. But the thing is that I will want to do a hundred times as much as I want to do today. And, you know, you go to any project leader and nobody says, you know, “I have enough. I have enough manpower, I have enough resources. I don’t need any more.” Okay? If you give him resources which are twice as efficient, he will do four times more.

    Pat Grady: Yeah.

    Michael Kagan: And he will want to do 10 times more. So it’s going to—it’s like electricity changes the world, right? Instead of using—you know, in London, you still see these gas lamps and this infrastructure to use the gas as the source of energy. Who could think that, you know, once this electricity was invented, it will change the world that, you know, we can’t live without electricity. The same with AI.

    Pat Grady: Awesome.

    Sonya Huang: Beautifully said.

    Michael Kagan: New world.

    Sonya Huang: Thank you so much for joining us today. I love this conversation.

    Michael Kagan: Thank you.

    Pat Grady: Thank you.

    Michael Kagan: Thank you for having me.

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  • ‘A stomach of steel’: amateur investors ride out dips amid talk of an AI bubble | Investing

    ‘A stomach of steel’: amateur investors ride out dips amid talk of an AI bubble | Investing

    It was more than just a hunch, says Jacob Foot of his first foray into US tech stock investments back in 2020.

    The 23-year-old says he played around with artificial intelligence tools in his first job and thought to himself: this technology is going to be a big deal.

    Foot put his savings each month into US shares and in particular the biggest investors in AI, the Magnificent Seven (M7). For several years the list has included the chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Meta (the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp).

    Five years on, Foot expects to complete the purchase of a “bigger house in London than I expected”, a dream he could not have realised without his stock market bets paying off.

    What marks out Foot and his generation of young stock market investors is their bravery. When shares slide, they refuse to sell. Instead they sit tight and wait for the upturn, or treat the dips as a buying opportunity.

    The week before last, shares dropped on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US the S&P 500, which tracks the largest listed companies in the US, lost more than 200 points.

    The drop came amid dire warnings of a major stock market correction, if not a full-blown financial crash. The Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the boss of the US bank JP Morgan were among those raising fears that popular investments, including tech company shares, gold, crypto and bonds, were over-valued and could implode.

    Yet despite the dire warnings, the stock market panic was shortlived and the loss of value was shallow, with the FTSE 100 and Wall Street again hitting record highs.

    The rises followed a boom month in September, when shares often go sideways or fall. The S&P rose by more than in any previous September in the last 15 years.

    The increases over the past 12 months are even starker, with shares in the M7 surging almost 37%, outstripping the 15% racked up by the rest of the S&P 500, according to FactSet data.

    The M7 now accounts for more than a third of the entire S&P 500 and Nvidia has a share price to earnings ratio of 54; investors would normally begin to twitch at a ratio of 25. Microsoft and Apple both passed $4tn valuation on Tuesday, joining Nvidia as the only companies to pass that threshold, though Apple later eased back just below.

    Why have valuations continued accelerating? The warnings from the IMF and others triggered selling by algorithmic trading platforms and even among seasoned professionals in the finance industry, but market watchers say young investors played a major role in averting a bigger fall.

    Companies that make money out of betting on dips in share values – short sellers – are so rattled they have taken to complaining about this new cohort of amateur speculators.

    Earlier this month, Carson Block, founder of the short seller Muddy Waters, told the Financial Times: “Cycles have become so long and the corrections so short, that the demand for traditional short selling is just not there.”

    Block said investors were confident, and ballsy, rallying around battle cries such as BTFD, or “buy the fucking dip”.

    President Trump Holds a Make America Wealthy Again event on 2 April, which he named ‘liberation day’. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

    One episode illustrates the point. On 3 April, while the S&P 500 dived by almost 5% the day after Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs, retail investors pushed more than $3bn into US stocks, according to Vanda Research – the largest daily injection of cash since the market analyst began keeping a tally in 2014.

    The phenomenon is leading to more interest in the “inelastic markets hypothesis”, proposed in 2021 by the economists Xavier Gabaix and Ralph Koijen, of the US thinktank the National Bureau of Economic Research, which argues that share prices can be pushed up by an increase in the amount of money available to invest.

    The theory goes that prices are rising not because of the prospects and profitability of the M7 and other popular assets, but because of the wall of money being pushed into the markets by amateur speculators. The trend has been compounded by an increase in low-cost passive investments by pension schemes and fund managers, which channel savings into an ever-smaller group of the fastest growing stocks.

    Sam Woods, the outgoing head of the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulatory Authority, said in a speech last week to City grandees that the financial services industry had “plenty to worry about” – including “opaque and complex private lending by non-banks, recent cracks emerging in US credit, the risk of an AI bubble, and overly concentrated life reinsurance structures”.

    But he played down the likelihood of a systemic disaster. “Given the hazardous terrain in which we now find ourselves, we seem reasonably well-equipped,” he said.

    That’s in the UK. The US is another matter, with a president in charge whose family has made hundreds of millions of dollars from cryptocurrency ventures and who wants to roll back regulations in a way that would horrify Woods.

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    Olivier Blanchard, a former IMF chief economist who is now emeritus economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is concerned. He believes that young investors have created “a perfect environment” for financial bubbles to grow and become unsustainable.

    “More and more young (and some not so young) investors do not think in terms of fundamentals, ie in terms of present discounted values,” he posted on X.

    “They base their decisions on past returns. What has gone up (bitcoin), will [continue going] up. Who cares about fundamentals?”

    Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at the trading platform IG, says: “The M7 remain hugely popular with individual investors. They are global titans, known everywhere and which generate huge profits.

    “Still, you need a stomach of steel to look through some of ups and downs.”

    He says investors are from across the age ranges but there has been an influx of younger people who cut their teeth dabbling in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

    Another factor could be the “house money effect” – the tendency to take greater risks reinvesting an early win, of the kind that might have followed a foray into high-profile stocks such as Tesla or Amazon or watching a friend make gains. Psychologically, the money placed on subsequent bets isn’t considered your own, so you’re less cautious.

    Low-cost trading apps will also have played a part the investment bonanza, along with and videos on YouTube and TikTok exalting the benefits of stock trading.

    “There is a natural read across to the crypto world, with people talking about how rich they would be if only they had bought bitcoin at $5,” Beauchamp says.

    Foot first bought Nvidia shares when they were priced at $25. In March this year they had risen to more than $140 before falling to $94. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty

    Experts question whether amateur traders will remain confident when there are so many warnings of an impending crash. Traditionally they have suffered badly by being last to join the party and last to cut their losses.

    Foot, who uses the IG-owned Freetrade website to buy and sell shares, describes his investment portfolio as a “sideline” while he worked full-time for three years, straight from school, as a tax analyst for the accountants EY. He says there have been nervous moments.

    He first bought Nvidia shares when they were priced at $25. In March this year they had risen to more than $140 before falling to $94 after Trump’s 2 April tariff announcement. But he held his positions and then bought more shares at the cheaper price. Nvidia stock has since recovered to trade at about $190 a share.

    “I wanted a good balance between ‘set and forget’ stocks like the M7 and a few smaller companies with good upside potential. It’s been quite a risk, but has paid off.

    “I didn’t deny myself the occasional holiday, but I took my own lunch to work,” he says of his determination to keep saving to invest each month.

    The AI revolution “has legs”, he says, and he remains heavily invested in the M7, where the chip designer Broadcom has now replaced Tesla. But he admits to becoming more conservative since cashing in his winnings for a mortgage deposit.

    In 2007, only a year before the biggest financial crash since the 1930s, the US banker Chuck Prince was asked why he had continued to provide sub-prime loans to people with low incomes and trade in exotic derivatives based on those loans.

    The former Citigroup boss answered: “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”

    Retail investors are still dancing, riding out the dips and pushing the market higher. How long that can continue before a loss of confidence triggers a correction is a question many market analysts would like to answer.

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