It’s a wrap: News this week (Apr 6 – Apr 12)

There have been multiple developments this week on the tech front. From AI chip announcements to data breaches, this is the list of the most important developments for a quick catch-up:

Top companies announce new AI chips

One of the highlights of the week was the launch of three major AI chips. Kicking off, Intel at its Vision 2024 event earlier this week launched Gaudi 3, an AI accelerator chip that is positioned as a competitor to Nvidia’s H100. Intel says that Gaudi 3 delivers 50% on average better inference and 40% on average better power efficiency than Nvidia H100, at a fraction of the cost.

Next, Google detailed the new version of its AI chips for data centers. This Arm-based central processing unit (CPU) is called Axion and will be made available through Google Cloud. "Axion is built on open foundations but customers using Arm anywhere can easily adopt Axion without re-architecting or re-writing their apps,” said Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud's vice president and general manager of compute and machine learning infrastructure, as reported by Reuters. 

Lastly, Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta also announced the second generation of its MTIA chips this week. Short for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA), the new generation is designed for the company’s ranking and recommendation models. While MTIA v1 was announced in May 2023, it is yet to be launched. Meta says that both the chips are in production now. 

CtrlS announced Google Cloud Interconnect services in three cities

Hyderabad-based CtrlS Datacenters on Monday announced the launch of Google Cloud Interconnect services in three cities – Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Delhi, which will allow its customers to establish direct and reliable connections to the cloud service provider. The Google Cloud Interconnect service will offer reduced latency and enhanced data transfer speeds, strengthen security, and increase agility, said CtrlS Datacenters.

This collaboration also makes CtrlS Datacenters one of the first partners for Google Cloud Interconnect in Hyderabad, where the service has been launched for the first time, the data center firm said in a media statement. 

TCS kicks off Q4FY24 earnings announcement

India’s largest IT services company TCS announced its financial results for the quarter ending March 2024 on Friday. The Tata Group-promoted company reported a revenue of Revenue at ₹61,237 crore, with 3.5% year-on-year growth. The full-year revenue stood at Full Year Revenue ₹240,893 crore.

The company said that FY 24 Order Book TCV was at all-time high of $42.7 billion, along with record Q4 TCV at $13.2 billion. “We are very pleased to close Q4 and FY24 on a strong note with the highest ever order book and a 26% operating margin, validating the robustness of our business model and execution excellence,” said K Krithivasan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director.

Major security threats 

Electronics accessories manufacturer boAt Lifestyle reportedly suffered a breach of personal data belonging to 7.5 million customers. This data surfaced on the dark web, accessing names, addresses, contact numbers, email IDs, and customer IDs of the customers, reports indicate.

Further, iPhone maker Apple has warned users in 91 countries including India about a new spyware attack. This spyware could is touted to be as dangerous as NSO Group’s Pegasus.