Hardware

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has won a $1.2 billion order from Vultr for AMD Helios AI racks, the first customer order HPE has announced for the system. Vultr plans to install the racks in US cloud data centres for model training and inference. Each rack combines 72 AMD accelerators with HPE’s Juniper networking, CPUs, network cards, cooling and AMD’s ROCm software. Why it matters A cloud operator adding AI capacity is buying an integrated rack rather than assembling chips, switches and cooling separately. The order gives AMD and HPE a large deployment in a market where Nvidia’s rack-scale systems set the commercial reference point. ...

The Dutch agency collecting mandatory data-centre reports lists 104 facilities, while the national industry association counts 186 commercial sites large enough to report. The gap comes from a year-long investigation by Lighthouse Reports and European media partners into energy and water disclosure. It shows that a legal reporting system can exist without giving the public a complete facility list or usable environmental data. Why it matters A city planner deciding whether the grid can support housing, industry and a new AI facility needs actual consumption records, not an estimate built from an incomplete registry. Missing sites make regional planning and public comparison less reliable. ...