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AMD takes on Nvidia with its Helios AI rack scale system

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Chipmaker AMD is taking aim at competitor Nvidia with its latest hardware release: a rack-scale system designed to power computing needs of the world’s largest AI labs.

At the company’s sold-out Advancing AI conference in San Francisco on Thursday, AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su promoted the new AI rack system known as Helios — along with its growing list of customers, including Microsoft — as the company prepares to ship it later this year. Su also pitched the company’s newest chips that are designed to feed the compute-hungry dragon that is the AI industry.

Rack systems combine many processors into a single high-powered unit. They are built for data centers, where they train and run AI models and other compute-intensive workloads.

Su called Helios the tech industry’s “highest performance AI rack,” adding that it was “built to train and run the most demanding frontier models in the world at massive scale.” The system will be deployed by leading AI companies at gigawatt-scale, the company said.

Nvidia has historically dominated this market with its Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell rack-scale systems. AMD is clearly looking to get in on the action. And Helios’ performance metrics appear to give it a real chance, beating out Vera Rubin by a number of metrics, the Register reported.

Helios, which was first revealed in 2025 and shown onstage in January at CES 2026, already has several well-known customers, including OpenAI, Meta, Oracle, Anthropic, and Microsoft, all of which have plans to deploy the system. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Monday that the company would expand its Azure infrastructure with Helios. Meanwhile, Anthropic and AMD announced a strategic partnership Wednesday for deploy up to two gigawatts of GPUs via the new rack system.

AMD also introduced Thursday its Venice-X CPU, which is designed for data centers and to handle high-computing workloads. The Venice-X is expected to launch in 2027.

During her remarks, Su commented on the trajectory of the chip industry, claiming that, by the year 2030, chips that power AI will become a massive part of the overall computing market. This’s because the industry is “seeing a step change in compute demand” driven largely by the rise of agentic AI, she said.

“When you ask the agent to do something, it actually has dozens of steps, and it has to reason, and it has to call tools, and it has to access data, and it has to keep doing it over and over until it solves the problem, and so you need lots of GPUs to do all that,” the executive said.

“We’re now expecting that by 2030, the AI accelerator market is going to reach about $1.4 trillion,” Su said. “What that means is, by the end of the decade, the AI accelerator market is going to approach the size of the entire semiconductor market today.”

“We do expect that GPUs are going to make up the vast majority of that market because the algorithms are still very much in their infancy, and we’re still continuing to see the workloads change, and that favors programmability in the overall silicon ecosystem,” she added.

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Small Businesses that can Improve your Pension Contributions

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BY NKECHI NAECHE-ESEZOBOR—As a worker, it is good to engage in side hustles to improve your pension contributions monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or even yearly.

Ideas for Small Businesses

POS: This is one of the cheapest businesses to start. With as little as N100,000, this business will take off. You can set aside a fixed percentage of your side income as your pension contribution.

Retail business: Provisions, foodstuffs, and even catering services such as small chops groundnuts, popcorn, snacks are also side hustles that can contribute to your pension savings.

Laundry services: This is another idea that is affordable and easy to start without needing much money. It can be set up on a small scale.

Vegetable farming / poultry or fish farming: Vegetables such as ugu, okro, ewedu, efo shoko, and efinrin can be planted in jerrycans and empty rice bags. You can get a carpenter to build small chicken pens so you can start your poultry business. For catfish, you just need bowls and a small space.

Service provider: Services such as freelance writing, transcription, and lecturing as a lesson teacher for WAEC, GCE,NECO JAMB, French, etc. can be done while still in active service. Some of these can be done on weekends, part-time, or even online.

You don’t need to struggle in retirement if you do the right thing.

The post Small Businesses that can Improve your Pension Contributions appeared first on Business Today NG.

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Amazon to fund 12 small nuclear reactors at former Indiana coal plant

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Amazon is funding development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana and would be the first customer to buy its power, the companies announced Monday. Utility company American Electric Power (AEP) would operate the plant. X-energy, which designs small modular nuclear reactors and went public in April, would supply the reactors.

The new power plant would consist of 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors and be located on the site of a demolished coal power plant just south of Terre Haute. The deal is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy, and it’s three times larger than the first, which was announced two years ago.

Amazon has invested heavily in X-energy, leading a $700 million Series C-1 round in October 2024. The two companies have said they ultimately plan to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the U.S. by 2039. 

Unlike many newly announced power plants, these reactors would be connected to the public electric grid, though Amazon says the power would also serve its data centers.

The companies’ aggressive timeline still depends on X-energy successfully delivering its first power plant at a Dow Chemical plant southeast of Houston, Texas. The site, called Seadrift, has recently been at the center of a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas, which accuses the plant of “habitual non-compliance” with water and solid-waste regulations and permits.

X-energy has yet to break ground at Seadrift, which will host four Xe-100 reactors to provide the chemical plant with heat and electricity. The company said its construction permit is in the final phases of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s review process.

Startups and large cloud computing companies are betting that small modular reactors (SMRs), like the kind being developed by X-energy, will help pull the nuclear industry out of its slump. The most recent nuclear power plants built in the U.S. suffered from egregious budget overruns and slipped timelines.

By shrinking the reactor, companies like X-energy hope that mass manufacturing will costs and schedules in line. Even then, it could be a tall order. Experts say mass manufacturing often doesn’t start producing benefits for about a decade.

X-energy debuted on the Nasdaq in April in an IPO priced at $23 per share. Investor excitement drove the price up 27% in the first day of trading, but shares of the newly public company have dropped by nearly two-thirds since then.

News of the Amazon deal sent X-energy’s shares up about 10% in pre-market trading, though they were down by less than 2% at the time of publication.

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