In this SC25 keynote analysis segment, theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson, John Furrier, Dave Vellante and Jackie McGuire set the stage for three days of live coverage from St. Louis as HPC finally has its mainstream moment. They unpack how GPU-dense racks, liquid cooling, rear-door heat exchangers and next-gen storage are reshaping data centers for AI, simulation and data-driven science, turning the show floor into an “art show for hardware nerds” and a proving ground for HPC+AI infrastructure at scale.
The conversation then zooms out to the economics and geopolitics of the AI build-out – from quantum’s long runway versus near-term AI gains, to multi-trillion-dollar CapEx bets, renewable energy dynamics, labor constraints and debates over whether an “AI bubble” is forming. The hosts dig into why standards, co-designed architectures with vendors like NVIDIA, emerging storage fabrics for agentic AI, safe innovation sandboxes such as Google’s Agent Sandbox and support from sponsors like Solidigm are becoming critical to keep SC25’s data center boom sustainable, resilient and ready for the next decade.
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Keynote Analysis
In this SC25 keynote analysis segment, theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson, John Furrier, Dave Vellante and Jackie McGuire set the stage for three days of live coverage from St. Louis as HPC finally has its mainstream moment. They unpack how GPU-dense racks, liquid cooling, rear-door heat exchangers and next-gen storage are reshaping data centers for AI, simulation and data-driven science, turning the show floor into an “art show for hardware nerds” and a proving ground for HPC+AI infrastructure at scale.
The conversation then zooms out to the economics and geopolitics of the AI build-out – from quantum’s long runway versus near-term AI gains, to multi-trillion-dollar CapEx bets, renewable energy dynamics, labor constraints and debates over whether an “AI bubble” is forming. The hosts dig into why standards, co-designed architectures with vendors like NVIDIA, emerging storage fabrics for agentic AI, safe innovation sandboxes such as Google’s Agent Sandbox and support from sponsors like Solidigm are becoming critical to keep SC25’s data center boom sustainable, resilient and ready for the next decade.
In this SC25 keynote analysis segment, theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson, John Furrier, Dave Vellante and Jackie McGuire set the stage for three days of live coverage from St. Louis as HPC finally has its mainstream moment. They unpack how GPU-dense racks, liquid cooling, rear-door heat exchangers and next-gen storage are reshaping data centers for AI, simulation and data-driven science, turning the show floor into an “art show for hardware nerds” and a proving ground for HPC+AI infrastructure at scale.
The conversation then zooms out to the economics and ge...Read more
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What are the general sentiments and discussions among attendees at this event?add
What emotions or sentiments are expressed regarding the current state and future of supercomputing technology?add
What is the current state and significance of hardware technology at the event being discussed?add
>> Good morning, HPC fans, and welcome to sunny St. Louis, Missouri. We're here on day one of Supercomputing. My name's Savannah Peterson, delighted to be kicking off three days of live coverage here with theCUBE, and I have my fabulous co-hosts for all the fun here with me, John, Dave, and Jackie. Thank you all for coming in here to the Midwest. I was expecting it to be a lot colder today and it's actually quite mild and lovely. I know, it's lovely out. It's a->> Pretty crazy storm last night, right?>> Yeah.>> Yes, I saw a beautiful lightning storm behind the arch last night and then torrential downpour.>> Oh my goodness. I am slightly jealous. We got delayed. Actually, maybe that's why we were so delayed getting in. I didn't look.>> It was rough.>> Well, that makes a lot of sense. I just have to kick this off. Walking in to this event having been here in the last four years, it is massive. HPC is having a moment. We've been talking about how hardware nerds are finally having another moment for them as well as AI goes to hardware, and man, it is just really exciting looking around. I'm curious, Jackie, I know you were in town yesterday having some conversations. What's the pulse? What's the energy? What are people talking about here on the ground?>> I think everybody's really excited and I've been... My husband's in the data center business and all I did yesterday was walk around and take pictures and send them to him and I was just like, "There is the coolest stuff here," things that I didn't even know were going on and I think everybody was just happy. It's interesting to me. I come from security, so this is a slightly different community, but it's also very tight-knit like security and I'm walking around with some of my friends and they know everybody. So I feel very honored to be able to be here for the first time and it seems like everybody's really excited for a lot of the new ideas. We're at, I don't think inflection point, that's probably hyperbole, but we're definitely at a focus point that supercompute hasn't seen up until this point, at least in mainstream tech, and so that's really exciting for the people who've been doing this work for years to have people actually understand what rear door heat exchangers are now.>> Yeah, and like liquid cooling is cool. You know?>> Yeah.>> There's just so many different conversations and I love that there's so many different players. It's not just the GPU kings here, there's a lot of different types of intersection. Dave, you've been covering the show for a long time as well. What do you notice that's different this year so far?>> I like how you started that off and giving your perspectives because you've been here for several years too. The first Supercomputing show, I think it was in 1988. Okay?>> It was. It was the year I was born. Supercomputing and I are the same age.>> That's amazing.>> I'm sure that makes Dave feel great.>> A lot more GPUs in there.>> We're both aging like fine wine.>> So we have been waiting for this moment for a long, long time. We were talking to Deborah Goldfarb last night at the AWS booth. She runs the quantum computing business for AWS and she and I worked together at IDC and I had the pleasure->> Oh, cool. I didn't know that.>> She was in my group and she drove the whole HPC business. And she used to say to me, "Dave, this AI thing, it's going to take off. It's going to go mainstream," until like I said, and it never really did, but we've been waiting for this moment for the longest time and now it is going mainstream, to your point. And I will say the other thing is there's a lot of heat in this room. There's a lot of racks. I don't know how many GPUs there are.>> Yeah, that's a real... I'm glad you called that out.>> That's why it's so warm in St. Louis. We're single-handedly... It's all the HPCs. That's amazing.>> There's a lot of equipment that's amazing in this building right now.>> Yes, there is.>> And it's the place to be. You know?>> I mean, I would bet there's probably a billion dollars of hardware in here, which is a bold claim.>> If not more.>> Yeah, but I mean, just thinking, I mean, I saw... I was personally mesmerized watching Dell's build for their rack that they did this hyperlapse video to coming into this event. And the whole time I'm sitting there watching like...>> Ooh.>> It's like tell me you're a hardware nerd without telling me you're a hardware nerd. But there really is, there's so much cool stuff. It's not just visuals of it. It's on the ground. John, you and I have covered the show together for four years. Great to be back together. What do you think is different? What do you think? The market's doing some interesting stuff right now. Lots of our customers here. What are you seeing?>> I mean, four years ago we saw it as an AI show and merging. Now it's full-blown AI and it's a data center love fest here. I mean, the nerd fest on the data center.>> Totally.>> Jackie mentioned cooling and power. Vertiv gas probably got the coolest display. There's some new->> Their booth was packed when I walked by. I had to go all the way around it.>> It's beautiful. If you're into data center, it's like art show. It's beautiful designs. You're starting to see the show move from old-school HPC, which is like glaciers moving every year, get a little faster, and then all of a sudden NVIDIA hits the scene. I think you saw a massive explosion of accelerated, they call it, computing. That is changing. Four years ago, it was just the basic chips were coming out and then that was the beginning of the large-scale clusters. And then now all the top hyperscalers, neoclouds, anyone who's got serious data center chops is loving life, hence the bubble conversation going on and all the investments on the CapEx, the build-outs are there. So it's definitely an AI tsunami on the infrastructure. So it's an infrastructure market. And talking to NVIDIA, they had a session yesterday, they're laying out the roadmap of simulation AI and then quantum. So they're starting to lay out the visibility to what they're thinking about quantum. They're actually using GPUs to figure out quantum. So the quantum game is going along. It's moving along, some say fast, I think okay, but they're actually using GPUs to figure out how to deal with the tooling, a completely different paradigm->> It makes sense. I mean, it's a sandbox, so it's >> It's the end of the earth.>> I think this show should->> Yeah, no.>> This show actually is Supercomputing, so I know->> There's a flash session later today that I really want to catch that's on whether we actually need quantum computing or not, whether HP, because->> But there is some interesting debate about that as well.>> Yeah, yeah. Because the energy-to-performance ratio, the data loss, obviously as you were talking about, there's still so many things that need to be figured out about quantum->> >> ... and I think the question right now is, is the time and energy best spent there or in refining the use cases of the AI that we're using right now? And I think it's a really interesting question because->> I agree with you.>> ... it's going to take another 10, 20 years for quantum to be commercially viable.>> The other thing->> But the energy is so much less. It's less energy-consumptive, so that's the sort of trade-off that you're making here.>> Yes, yeah.>> And the other point I'd say, Savannah and Jackie, is that this year what's different is there's more prospecting customers. Last year was more, and the years where Preet is here, more->> I think that's a great point.>> ... do some deals. We're hearing more about "get me some customers" because they've built out enough capacity in some of these overbuilds, I won't say overbuild, maybe that's a bad word, but they're overbuilding, definitely building.>> Yeah. Some things are overengineered in this room. It's okay to say that.>> And so here's the customers. Where are the investors? Who's going to keep pouring money in? So there's a lot more less tech, some business stuff coming in. It's more customer money. Where's the money going to come from? Huge dynamic that we've never seen before.>> Yeah, I'm really glad you called that out. You actually called out two things I want to highlight. One, you called it an art show. It very much is an art show for nerds. Did you know they actually do an art show here? There is a high-performance computing art competition. I've actually tried to enter the last couple of years and didn't get my stuff together, but working on it.>> That's cute. Folks, you heard it first.>> Yeah, but it really is that. One thing that I noticed right away, and I noticed this actually in the airport late last night when we landed, was the amount of international investment in this show this year. There's ads for Taiwan AI right away when you get off your aircraft. We're sitting across from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which is a mouthful, but there really is a wildly... I mean, I think this is a Japanese university, but I don't even know what's going on. The world is at this show now. When we were sitting in Dallas, John, in that weird, creepy basement four years ago, it felt like the American companies, the American universities. Yes, there was NASA and some cool stuff going on, but it wasn't this global commitment, and the energy here is serving me real CES. It's serving me real this is the big show for HPC, much bigger than GTC and DC.>> What about China? Maybe I just missed it, but I haven't seen an obvious China presence here.>> Do you think they would be obvious if they were here? Seriously.>> Well, you know they're here.>> That's what I'm saying.>> No question.>> Yeah, they're in incognito mode.>> Yeah, 100 P.>> But we've seen Alibaba at shows before with booths, and I haven't seen a big presence here.>> The national sight scene is->> I bet they're walking the floor.>> Oh, no doubt. 100%.>> Yeah, yeah. I would assume because... Yeah. I mean, although nerds aren't very combative. I was just thinking if people would go up and pick a fight.>> Nah.>> On the international thing, Savannah, it's an interesting point because if you look at all the action on the chip side, it's SK Hynix, it's Samsung, a lot of the memory which they're trying to weave into NVIDIA's architecture, not just the InfiniBand but the ethernet->> 100%.>> ... of the chips. And so that's been kind of out there. Everyone's talking about HBM. Storage is a big show highlight this year. We heard a bunch of things last night on storage->> Interesting.>> ... consortiums forming because they want to get some standards around these large-scale storage fabrics.>> Well, no storage, no agentic AI.>> Yes, exactly.>> No AI, even.>> No AI, yeah. And I think that's the thing with the cost component that we did a breaking analysis on this a couple weeks ago. Nobody wants to admit this, but there is going to be a massive volume of storage generated by agents because while you don't have to log most of what a human does until they actually get to the important part, you have to log everything an agent does. And that->> Absolutely right, Jackie.>> ... those logs have to be retained anywhere from a couple years to a decade. If you're dealing with Medicare, a decade from the date of service. So imagine you have some healthcare chatbot, every single, every training, every model you train for that chatbot, you retrain that model, you have to store the old models. Those models are massive. And so I just think there's a lot of... Storage is going to be weight. I think the weight of racks is something that we're not focused on yet that we will and->> That's actually a wonderful point. I'm glad you brought that up. It's heavy.>> We were just having this conversation last night, myself and a group of people who are building data centers, because you can't put AI racks in old data centers. The foundations can't hold the weight. And so I think those data centers will actually be converted to storage centers.>> That's a great point, Jackie. You brought up the data centers. You look at NVIDIA's biz dev activity, look at some of the reference architectures. There's a whole trend towards this co-design. They call it extreme co-design. But that changes the ecosystem because what does the ecosystem have to do to do co-design? They have to be multi-party, multi-party ecosystem. And I just put that on LinkedIn because you got to be on the roadmap two years in to do a storage fabric with NVIDIA or AMD. So it's not just do a deal, "Hey, source some chips." There's some serious engineering involved and it takes->> Oh, absolutely.>> And that's a big part of this year. NVIDIA's moves are all in that area right now and you see that's why some of the stock pops when you see a deal with NVIDIA.>> And a big part of that co-design is NVIDIA co-designing->> With->> ... across its stack and then bringing in the ecosystem and saying, "Okay, here's how we're doing it. Now you can plug in.">> How are you going to orchestrate that workload across a massive system? That is a engineering problem that is new this generation that even four years ago, no one was talking about orchestrating->> It wasn't even a blip on the radar in Dallas.>> ... a workload across a physical data center. Yeah, it was like, "Okay"->> Standards weren't either, right? For years, we've been trying to hold companies accountable to some type of standard for their data, for their integrations, all of those things. So this is going to cause a seismic shift in you can't any longer be->> I don't know. So I think->> ... "I'm in security. I'm a security company that has eight different formats for my data for one platform.">> Which is insanity, which is absolute insanity. I don't know. I think IEEE, we had IEEE sitting behind us four years ago, and I mean, there's definitely this community, more than some, is very standards-heavy. They care. The HPC people get it because standards means savings, and that, I think, is actually really compelling. I think it's important. One of the interesting conversations I've been having the last few weeks at some analyst events is all around data centers and the battle, like what the modern wars, sorry to be dramatic, but what the modern geopolitical battles will be over and it's going to be over water, power, and data centers. And it's wild to think that these are going to be the assets, the king and queen on your chessboard when it comes to figuring out your place, not only in the world and the economy, but in business and market share and it's kind of... I mean, as a total geek, wow, I almost just swore, as a geek, I really feel like this is a validating moment from a like, "Hey, guys, look at us. The hardware always mattered. Your software was cute, but it all is actually data. It all needs a place to be stored. It needs to be processed. It needs models that are efficient," and who knows how we're going to be computing that? Whether that's with a CPU, NPU, GPU, quantum, whatever that is, it's all going to require all this energy. So->> You're right.>> And to Dave's point with China, what China has that the US doesn't->> They got power.>> ... is power.>> And they got land.>> And they have renewable energy.>> Land, power, and water, those are the three big things you need.>> Exactly.>> Well, so they have water in some places but not others, so that actually is one. Inland China has issues with water, so that is an area where they do need work.>> To your point, power is not a constraint.>> But they are the largest supplier->> To use might be a constraint.>> ... and consumer of renewable energy in the world.>> It's that tension.>> And as the US starts to pivot back towards fossil fuels, that unfortunately is going to create a massive opportunity for China to lean in even more because the US is no longer producing renewable energy components. We're moving away from that. And I was just listening to a podcast->> Absolutely, Jackie.>> ... this morning about how China is now the number one distributor of renewable energy components, and their intention is to keep leaning into that, especially as our policy shifts the other way.>> So people are talking about the constraints to building out data centers and the market's freaking out now. It's down another 1.5% today. Lots of talk about bubble. We just did a breaking analysis that we quantified that the cumulative spend between now and 2030 on data center build-outs, AI factories, will be about $4 trillion. And the revenue, cumulative revenue, at that time will be about half that. So you get a $2 trillion gap between revenue and CapEx and->> Just a small delta.>> We don't need to no stinking revenue. We got private equity.>> Right, but there is a breakeven for a while.>> We see it.>> We see a breakeven. It's about a 10-year breakeven. So the point being, a lot of stuff has to happen before then. There's going to be a lot of patience and a lot of pullbacks. The dot-com bubble, there were many, several 10% market declines, and it looks like we're in the middle of one now.>> But it's demand, there's demand here.>> Do we have enough cement trucks to pour $4 trillion worth of data center foundations?>> And engineers to build these?>> Do we have enough people to pull?>> Power?>> Each data center has 200 miles of cable inside it. Do we have enough people to pull all that cable? Do we have enough to people to go->> Big people, expensive cable too.>> Yeah. Do we have enough people to go swap out filter walls? And I keep going back to the labor piece and I had a roundtable with a bunch of universities last night about this about how we need to start->> Cool.>> ... going to two-year community colleges and building that skilled labor today.>> Yeah. And I think it'll happen. I do because->> Yeah, that's a great point.>> ... if there's a vacuum there, people will fill it. But these bubbles, I don't think we're in a bubble because I think the demand still far outstrips the supply->> Well, the question of the bubble->> ... but demand far outstrips the supply. When that flips, maybe that's when the bubble bursts.>> The question on the bubble that Jackie brought up earlier about storage, if this AI infrastructure can't enable value, there's going to be a glut of almost a halfway spot between the bubble bursting that we can't get value and the pressure will be all those people that are buying, how can they sell those compute cycles? I think marketplaces might emerge. So I'm looking at->> Well, that's the software layer too. That's to your earlier point.>> Well, I mean, agentic infrastructure is based upon the fruit coming off the tree on the infrastructure. So if the infrastructure doesn't work fast enough, then it's going to be a slowdown on the agentic. Yeah, there'll->> Well, they're->> ... be some RAG search stuff->> Infrastructure, data house in order so you can serve agentic and govern it, secure it. A lot of things have to happen, and I think they will, it's just going to take a decade.>> It's going to get real messy here for a minute, I think, and that's all right. We're in this growth stage. If we're going to take all of this to scale, compliance, there's a whole bunch of things that are very complicated.>> New waves are messy.>> Hey, exactly.>> That whole J-curve thing is->> Exactly. And it's why some of the smarter companies are launching, like Google's Agent Sandbox that they launched last year, or last year, jeepers, last week. We have been on the road a lot. Forgive me. It's a safe zone for play at scale that doesn't destroy your entire business and your entire system. And I think we're going to see a lot more of these types of solutions come out so that people can get messy in a safe space before they just destroy everything.>> And I'm not going to take full credit, but I, for three months, have been saying, "We need broader adoption of sandboxing. Everybody who touches a computer should know what a sandbox was. Give people safe places to do risky things." So thank you, Google, because we all should be playing in the sandbox.>> Well, speaking of Google, Google was the only one that didn't go down on the Cloudflare outage this morning.>> This morning, yeah.>> You saw that->> That's because of the previous issue they fixed, right, as you know?>> Yeah. I think they're->> Maybe Google's not using Cloudflare.>> Yeah. We were in their offices in Ann Arbor yesterday->> CDN.>> ... and it was a topic conversation.>> Another outage, Dave. Amazon, Azure. Who's next?>> What happens when the lights go off?>> Like you said, I couldn't help, you said, "It's going to get messy," and all I could see was that Marie Kondo meme that's like, "I'm so happy because I love mess." I trade options so I'm like, "Hell yeah. Give me some volatility for a year or two and I'll make some money.">> You're getting your vol.>> I am, I am.>> Absolutely.>> I know, I was just->> >> I think that ->> Your chaos is happening.>> ... four-letter words this morning because I sold a put too early, but...>> You like chaos, Jackie? No, yeah, come on.>> A little bit. I don't like->> On that note->> I get bored easily.>> Oh, you couldn't time the market perfectly? Wow, what's wrong with you?>> I'm no Michael Burry.>> We're all trying. We're all trying. Speaking of things that aren't chaos, we have a wonderful lineup this week. We've got 32 segments scheduled over the next couple of days. We've got probably looking like over 50 guests from some of the biggest companies in the world. It's going to be absolutely fantastic, and I cannot wait to dig into all those stories.>> Today is day one, brought to you by Solidigm, our big sponsor for today.>> Shout out to Solidigm.>> It's awesome.>> All right.>> Appreciate their support, yeah.>> Very grateful for our friends at Solidigm. This is going to be wonderful. Cannot wait to hear all the customer and partner stories that they have curated for us. We're all about making the rubber hit the road here at HPC party land, the art show that we are in, and it's going to be great. John, Dave, and Jackie, thank you so much for kicking it off right.>> Thanks, guys.>> Thanks.>> Thank you.>> And thank all of you for tuning into our three days of live coverage on the ground in St. Louis, Missouri here at Supercomputing. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.
