AMD, the UK’s DSIT and MongoDB: Top Tech News This Week
AMD Unveils New Hardware and Software at Advancing AI
Dr Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, and her team have revealed several major hardware and software innovations at AMD’s Advancing AI event today, all set to power the next generation of data centres, enterprise workloads and physical AI systems.
Spanning hardware and software – from sixth generation EPYC CPUs and Instinct MI400 GPUs to the new ROCm.ai developer suite – the announcements mark a significant step forward in AMD’s open ecosystem strategy.
“Our mission is to push the boundaries of high performance and AI computing,” Lisa said, during the opening of the Advancing AI keynote. “I often say AI is the most important technology in the last 50 years.”
Lisa pointed to the industry consuming more than 35 quadrillion tokens every month, with 60% of today’s capacity used for inference rather than training.
She put this down to the increased use of agentic AI: “Compute demand is growing at an incredible pace. When you ask the agent to do something, it has dozens of steps… so you need lots of GPUs to do all that reason and a lot of CPUs to orchestrate every step around it.”
Burnham Scraps DSIT But Names First UK AI Minister
New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has shut down the government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), merging most of its responsibilities into the business department.
Delivering on the new PM’s promise of a “pro-business” administration, former business secretary Jonathan Reynolds will lead the newly created Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade.
Other responsibilities of DSIT have moved to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – which is being renamed as the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport – led by Lisa Nandy.
The move comes despite strong pushback from technology entrepreneurs and industry leaders who urged the government to keep DSIT intact.
How Scale Computing Aims to Advance Edge AI with AMD CPUs
Edge computing and network solutions provider Scale Computing is adding support for AMD CPU-based infrastructure in its SC//HyperCore virtualisation suite version 9.7. This incorporates AMD EPYC and AMD Ryzen processors.
The update expands deployment options for Scale Computing edge solutions, simplifying virtualisation and AI-enabled workloads closer to where data is generated.
The SC//Reliant edge computing as a service platform already supports infrastructure powered by AMD CPUs for retail and distributed edge environments.
The addition of AMD EPYC and AMD Ryzen processor support in SC//HyperCore extends the collaboration between the two entities further across the Scale Computing portfolio.
This move will benefit organisations looking to simplify operations and support emerging AI-enabled workloads outside the centralised data centre.
For Scale Computing customers and partners, the release addresses a long-requested need for broader platform choice across the edge, the data centre and distributed enterprise environments.
MongoDB: How AI Helps Retailers Pivot to World Cup Results
How do retailers respond to these overnight emotional swings? Genevieve Broadhead, Global Industry Lead at MongoDB, advocates for how modern technology allows brands to adapt their storefronts, promotions and supply chains in real time to match the unpredictable chaos of live events.
Historically, retailers predicted the future by looking at previous customer behaviour.
“Retailers would have used past sales to judge how much stock they needed for a particular year,” Genevieve says. “Understanding how many beers or how many jerseys we sold in the previous World Cup would have helped them to understand what they might sell in the next.”
While historical modelling can help estimate baseline demand, it fails entirely when the whistle blows. The true differentiator today is the ability to react to what Genevieve calls "signals in real time".
Imagine you are watching a match at a friend’s house. “If your team loses, unfortunately, a lot of people will pack up and go home,” she says. "If your team is winning, you might want to continue the party. You might jump onto Uber Eats and get a few more beers or pizzas."
Power Limits Force New York to Freeze 50MW Data Centres
The AI revolution has officially collided with the physical realities of the world’s energy infrastructure. By enacting a one-year freeze on new hyperscale data facilities, New York has become the first US state to formally halt development of data centres using 50MW of power or more for up to one year.
The order was signed by New York Governor Kathy Hochul on 14 July, with the goal of establishing a comprehensive environmental regulatory framework.
While the moratorium legally blankets all commercial data storage facilities of this scale, the freeze was overwhelmingly catalysed by the unprecedented power demands of the generative AI boom.
“We’re in the midst of one of the most significant economic upheavals in generations… perhaps ever,” Kathy says. “These hyperscale AI data centres consume enormous amounts of power, truly threatening to outpace our grid’s capacity. They drive up costs for local ratepayers and I refuse to let those costs get passed down to New Yorkers.”
