To spell it out: if you are not in the CVP or Daybreak program, the best cybersecurity model in the world is Chinese. It is not in 6th place behind Mythos, Fable, Astra, Opus, and Sol. It is in 1st. And even if you are in these programs, you still get plenty of downgrades from the classifier, and rejections from the model There are big implications to this. Open research being biased towards GLM’s capability frontier. More production traces going to ZAI. More tooling built around open models in general. Etc

SemiAnalysis ClusterMAX Lead @JordanNanos explains how Nebius picked up demand CoreWeave couldn’t handle and then executed well enough to reach the Platinum tier of its GPU cloud rankings: “CoreWeave has set the standard. I mean, they are the best in terms of technology.” “These guys deploy 10,000 GPUs a week at the peak when they’re building data centers. That’s incredible.” “But their balance sheet is full. There’s only so many people and resources you can marshal to build out another gigawatt when they’re going to 15 and beyond.” “We have customers coming to us and saying, ‘I saw you write such good things about CoreWeave. I just have $100 million I’m trying to give to them. They’re telling me they can’t accept it until May of next year because they’re backed up.’” “And therefore Nebius has been capitalizing.” “They’ve also executed very well. The technology that they’ve developed is strong.” “We think that managed clusters are approaching this feature-complete world where it’s hard to tell the difference in quality between Nebius and CoreWeave.” “Certainly our testing experience has been really solid on both of them.”

SemiAnalysis' @JordanNanos predicts that chip startups will become the next wave of neoclouds, building their own data centers. "Cerebras has become a neocloud, Groq is buying Nvidia GPUs and spinning up a neocloud. Others like SambaNova are doing this themselves. We see OpenAI Jalapeño that'll go into self-build sites." "Chip companies are like, 'Not only do I need to battle in the supply chain for allocation like TSMC and the memory providers, I also need to go get my data centers set up. I need to learn about construction, I need to learn about day-2 operations.'" "Who's going to train people to repair a Cerebras wafer-scale engine and their 250 megawatts of compute they're bringing online in the next couple of years? It's them." "They need to build that capability in-house and frankly, I think they're going to realize a bunch of benefits to their margin profile for doing this. AWS and Google already proved you can do this with TPU and Trainium."

SemiAnalysis' @JordanNanos on the neocloud talent wars: "It's across the entire supply chain. We see this in electricians, data center technicians, and operators. Salaries for electricians in Louisiana and Abilene, Texas, are up 3x to 5x." "Crusoe just came in and paid these guys so much more money. But they're out of people. They need to train. No matter what job we're talking about, people just need to be trained." "The most successful neoclouds that we're seeing have this pipeline to take talent from other related areas and get them contributing to neocloud management and day-2 operations where a software engineer can start to work as an SRE on one of these teams."

Happy Thursday. On today's show: - @CompleteSkeptic (TypeSafe) - @JordanNanos (SemiAnalysis) - @leifthunder (Public) - @hoomanrenezhad (Solcoa) - @erika_alden_d (Pioneer Labs) - @Shalev_lif & @RomiLifshitz (Enclosure) See you on the stream.

posting articles is fun. so far, tons of outreach for: - access to the AI Cloud TCO model (which includes our Neocloud Dashboard, below) for pricing data, site maps, company financials, input costs, and more - providers getting in for ClusterMAX 3.1, including some big GB300 deployments that we missed testing - customers with some crazy stories about reliability, security, and performance - investors going down the list to find the next big Neocloud that can address this mid-market need for managed clusters for the Neolabs - access to sample SLAs, and intros to insurance providers who are backing these rental contracts - participation in PostTrainingX, where we test managed RL infrastructure services and RLaaS/FDE work (or as they call it, forward deployed researchers - participation in SandboX (and to review initial results) where we benchmark CPU/memory setups for agentic coding environments - participation in EndpointX (and to review initial results) where we test managed inference endpoints - security research and a ton of good applications to join the team. please reach out!

ClusterMAX 3.0: The Industry Standard GPU Cloud Rating System Returns In gory detail: reliability, performance, support, pricing —and, of course, security— in our most thorough analysis of GPU cloud providers globally

ClusterMAX 3.0 is here! ClusterMAX 3.0 debuts with a comprehensive review of the neocloud industry, covering 77 providers. We increase our market view to cover 323 providers, up from 209 in ClusterMAX 2.0, 169 in ClusterMAX 1.0, and 124 in the original AI Neocloud Playbook and Anatomy article. We have now interviewed well over 200 end users of neoclouds as part of this research. We update our itemized list of criteria across 10 categories, and update our direct descriptions of our expectations for Slurm, Kubernetes, Standalone Machines, Monitoring Dashboards, and Health Checks. All of this content is live on our website. We encourage providers to use these lists when developing their offerings. We still consider these lists as an amalgamation of our experience interviewing end users, making them representative of the features that end users expect from their cloud providers. Nebius joins CoreWeave in the Platinum tier. While CoreWeave still sets the technical bar for others to follow, Nebius is now established as a provider that consistently commands a premium pricing over others. Strong business decisions by Nebius have put them in a position to serve an entire class of neolabs at seller’s prices. Google Cloud joins Oracle in the Gold tier. Azure moves to Silver, Fluidstack moves to Unavailable, and Crusoe drops to Bronze. Lambda, Firmus and TensorWave remain in Silver, while GMI moves up to Silver from Bronze. Many companies drop from Silver (or Gold) to Bronze or lower. We raise the bar this round as only 19 neoclouds globally achieve a Medallion rating. We establish a tier between Bronze and Underperforming: the Participation Ribbon tier. 15 providers join this rating, which more accurately describes our opinion that they do the bare minimum to get by.

More than 300 local governments have moved to pause data centers. There is a three-step plan for dealing with that. "Many folks don't realize we're starting to get into a moment of oversupply of early-stage projects." "This is fairly cheap political signaling." "Some people were actually net positive on AI while being net negative on data centers." "Give me your three-step plan to get the political opposition to chill out a bit." "Create your own town."

Quite dismissive to both the “three guys” and the “Claude and Codex subscriptions” to imply you can’t do any “advanced” hacking with a small team Security is asymmetric, attackers only need to find one vuln. They strung together 6. And they are impressive!

Prediction for hot chips: every startup and custom silicon program says something along the lines of “we gave up on trying to build a universal compiler and are just having AI write kernels for us by targeting the hardware instead of a bunch of abstractions… and get this, it’s actually working”

love when @OpenAI is open. incredible contribution to @OpenComputePrj 1. multiplane design for 800GbE. 2 tiers for 131k endpoints 2. custom MRC protocol that extends RoCE to support packet spraying 3. switch from dynamic to static routing with SRv6

cool idea from DeepSeek in their DualPath paper! instead of loading all KV's directly onto GPUs from local NVMe (or DRAM) and bottlenecking on the local PCIe bus, they can stage the KV's in the DRAM on the decode GPU servers, and then transfer the KV's to the prefill GPUs via GDRDMA