Wherever you turn in tech these days, one story dominates: the phenomenally costly AI data centre boom.
Even at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the biggest annual showcase of consumer technology, the new Leviathans of AI were never far from view. The biggest news from Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang was an update on his company’s next data centre chip. Although it has spent some time exploring the idea of developing a new line of processors for PCs, Nvidia still seems in no hurry to put its silicon into everyday consumers’ hands.
Yet even as data centres hog attention, the PC market is going through significant changes of its own. A gust of competition from PCs based on Arm’s chip designs has broken open a market that had been dominated by Intel-developed technology. Microsoft also recently ended support for Windows 10, typically the prelude to a hardware upgrade cycle as customers switch their operating system.