The project includes expanding its farming pods, building training, research, worker accommodation, and tourism facilities. Read...

It’s raining money, at least if you’re selling graphics cards. According to recent industry research, the market for graphics processing units is set to hit about $100 billion in 2024. It’s a massive shift in a market segment that was already growing quite quickly. But don’t get too excited, gamers. We aren’t the ones buying. Almost all of that growth is driven by an explosion in AI infrastructure, according to Jon Peddie Research in a new market report, which confirms that Nvidia is reaping most of the benefit in this change. That’s hardly surprising if you’ve even been glancing at the news lately. Selling AI hardware for data centers, just a couple of years after selling some of the same hardware for cryptocurrency generation, has driven Nvidia to become the most valuable company on the planet. (By market cap, anyway. There are other ways to measure corporate value, but that’s an argument for bigger brains than mine.) For a bit of broad context on this $100 billion number, the estimated worldwide revenue for smartphones in 2023 was about $500 billion according to Statista, and vehicle sales totaled about $2.1 trillion for the top 20 manufacturers. Nvidia is definitely the go-to vendor for any company that wants to rapidly scale up flexible, AI-focused data centers, if you have the scratch. Nvidia’s next-generation AI hardware is projected to cost between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit at the top tier. That’s the kind of “big iron” that makes an RTX 4090 look affordable, and it’s partly why the headline of this article is in dollars rather than concrete chips or cards. But, of course, Nvidia isn’t the only player in the market right now, even if it’s absolutely dominating at the moment. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Broadcom are all nipping at Nvidia’s heels, and even some surprise players like Apple and Meta (Facebook) get a mention in the short form of Jon Peddie’s report. It’s worth pointing out that selling chips for AI data centers isn’t the only way to make some scratch in GPUs. Naturally, you’ve got both discrete and integrated graphics for PCs, smartphones, and tablets, game consoles, and even more specialized hardware going into cars, VR headsets, and wearables like smartwatches. As the report says, “GPUs have become ubiquitous and can be found in almost every industrial, scientific, commercial, and consumer product made today.” Total volume for the AI portion of the market is actually comparatively low, even if it’s driving the lion’s share of the profits. Long story short: People are still going to play games and stream video, even if they’re talking to ChatGPT to help stem the crushing tide of digital isolation while they do it. Someone has to make and sell that hardware. It’ll be interesting to see how the focus on high-margin business-to-business sales affects Nvidia’s output in 2025, and how the rest of the market adapts to that. After all, Nvidia can only make so many chips, and it’s not going to be too concerned with the $500 profit on a top-of-the-line RTX 5090 Ti Super-Duper Magnum MAX if it can more reliably make $10,000 selling a chip to the next AI startup that’s splashing around in buckets of angel investor cash. That could open up some space for the likes of AMD, Intel, and others to finally try and sell more GPUs to consumers, especially at the mid-tier and low-end. But this is all navel-gazing. The only thing we can say for sure is that there’s going to be a lot of money made selling GPUs in the near future. Read...

A local business owner said he felt angry they were taking another hit after months of disruption. Read...

As a tech writer, I’ve seen a lot of theoretical gadgets come and go — or perhaps more accurately, never actually exist and then… continue to not exist. While it’s true that tech companies are constantly iterating, experimenting, and telling their patent lawyers to draw up scribbles, nerds like us also have a bad habit of letting our imaginations run wild. Case in point: the Xbox handheld. Rumors of some kind of Microsoft-made competitor to the Game Boy have been floating around since the original Xbox launched more than 20 years ago. And for even longer, anyone who tries to step up to Nintendo on its stomping ground — including Sega, Sony, and Nokia — gets, well, stomped. So why is it we’re still hearing rumblings about a new Xbox handheld game machine, a decade after the PlayStation Portable breathed its last? It might be because Valve has bucked the trend. The Steam Deck is an unqualified smash hit, selling millions of units in just a couple of years. It has people excited about PC games on the go for the first time in a long time, and it’s so influential that we’re already seeing dozens of riffs on similar form factors from other companies like Asus, Lenovo, MSI, and Acer. All of them are using similar AMD-based hardware but running Windows instead of Valve’s super-efficient Linux-based SteamOS, so Microsoft is working with them to a greater or lesser degree. Maybe that’s why people are once again pontificating on the idea of a portable, all-Microsoft game console. Valve has basically given them the blueprint, and Microsoft no longer needs to lean on proprietary Xbox hardware, or even local hardware at all. It might be able to leverage the popular Xbox Game Pass service and its streaming capabilities to get people invested across the console-PC divide. Valve/Nvidia It’s on the mind of the business heads at Bloomberg (via Android Authority) who asked Microsoft’s gaming lead Phil Spencer about it in a recent interview. Spencer confirmed that Microsoft has been “working on prototypes and considering what it might do,” in Bloomberg’s words. But it’ll be years until we might see such a device. Emphasis on “might”! In the meantime, Microsoft is working on making the Xbox app (wherein gamers can access Game Pass downloads and game streaming) better on low-power portable gaming devices. So, yeah, don’t expect an Xbox handheld anytime soon, if at all. It’s important to temper our expectations with a reality check. The Steam Deck is a smash hit, yes… in the context of the PC market. Valve hasn’t released total sales numbers, only saying that it sold “multiple millions” at around this time last year. Let’s be generous and assume that’s two million, and that Valve sold another two million Steam Decks since then. (If they had hit the 10 million mark, I think they would’ve made it public and celebrated.) So, under five million Steam Decks total, and perhaps half again as many in the same form factor, like the ROG Ally. Compare that to the number of portable Switch consoles Nintendo has sold in the system’s seven-year lifetime: almost 150 million. You couldn’t blame Microsoft for feeling a bit gun-shy going up against Valve, which had to experiment for a decade with the Steam Controller, Steam Machines, and Steam Link before it had a hardware hit. And Microsoft isn’t exactly in a position to bet big on hardware right now, being dead last in the current console generation by a huge margin. For a massive company looking for stable returns — one that’s diversified far beyond the gaming market even if you consider it the “steward” of PC gaming — it makes sense to let partners like Asus take the big risks. In the (approximate) words of the immortal Regina George… Paramount Pictures So if you’re waiting for a portable Xbox, stop waiting. Buy a Steam Deck and enjoy it. (There’s even a snazzy new white version coming!) Or maybe get a ROG Ally if you want to run Windows. Alternatively, enjoy streaming games on your phone via Xbox Game Pass or Nvidia GeForce Now, and maybe get one of those new 8BitDo controllers. The future is now, even if you have to fiddle with a few settings to make it work right. Read...

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Quest Insurance Group was found to have failed to maintain a minimum solvency margin for its non-life insurance business. Read...

An Upper Hutt man has been jailed for nearly four years after fraudulently obtaining more than $80,000 in Covid business support loans. Read...

Celonis has launched a new Sustainability Layer, empowering companies to measure and improve their sustainability efforts while enhancing business performance. Read...

A business owner found guilty of indecently touching an employee after a work function has failed to have his conviction dropped. Read...

Dedicated fibre business is leveraging advanced technology from Ciena to double traffic capacity on parts of its network, highlighting additional investment. Read...