Timothy Prickett Morgan

The title says it all, really. But make no mistake: There is still plenty of competition in the mark ...

Like so many other IT suppliers to the tech titans, it will not be long before AI networking will be ...

Not everybody has a datacenter that supports liquid cooling, and not every company, particularly tho ...

Like many of you, I had been expecting for Big Blue to deliver the kicker to the entry level “Bonnell” Power10-based Power S1012 that was announced a few years back during the PowerUP 2026 conference. This long-awaited machine will be the only Power11 system that is offered for those many, many IBM i customers in the P05 software tier, and will presumably have a beefier hardware configuration that crosses over into the P10 IBM i software tier.

Demand for CPU and GPU compute as well as main memory and flash memory were already so high that IT ...

Sometimes, to solve a particular system architecture problem, you have to invent a new technology. And sometimes, you just need to squint at the problem a little and look at what you already have and use the parts in a different way.

There will probably never be a better time for any AI-related company to go public than between right now and next summer. The GenAI frenzy is at a fever pitch, and the big four hyperscalers and cloud builders alone – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft Azure – have collectively projected for capital expenses to be somewhere between $695 billion and $725 billion in 2026. There is probably at least that much expected to be spent between the big AI model builders (who are starting to build their own datacenters), hyperscalers in China, plus sovereign AI centers, HPC centers, academic centers, and governments who are also wanting to get in on the GenAI action.

The details are really thin, as usual, but IBM is still talking about the advantages that the Power10 and Power11 processors have over other server-class CPUs in the market today, as Power chief architect Bill Starke did at the most recent POWERUp conference in New Orleans. And Starke always ends his presentations with a hint or two about what Power Next or Power Future – what we would call Power12 – might look like.

We are all full aware of what the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and AI model builders are all doing to build out their datacenter infrastructure to support their AI aspirations. But it is hard to get a sense of what regular enterprises, service providers, governments, academic institutions, neoclouds, and sovereigns – who will eventually represent maybe half of total AI spending – are doing. So we have to use the sales of the traditional original equipment manufacturers as a kind of proxy.

The last time that Dell had a blowout quarter like the one that it has turned in was probably back when Michael Dell was selling custom PCs from his dorm room at the University of Texas. More than four decades later, the iron driving the business to new heights is, of course, AI systems, and is much bigger and more expensive but only delivering mid single digits of operating income. Which means Dell has to sell a lot more of it to get a return.