Norwegian Cruise Line unveils revitalised ships and new itineraries for summer 2025, ET TravelWorld
While Southeast Asia remains a key growth market for NCL, the cruise line is particularly focused on tapping into India's fly-cruise segment. 'Our focus out of here is fly-cruise. We're looking to serve the Indian customer who's ready to vacation in Europe, America, Canada, Hawaii or Australia,' Borg said. He added that the upcoming launches of Norwegian Aqua and Norwegian Luna would open up more itinerary choices for Indian travellers.
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Time of India
34 minutes ago
- Time of India
Turf war in the clouds showers on the ground
Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Indian data centre companies are looking to attract neocloud firms such as Coreweave , Lambda Labs, Crusoe and Nebius, which offer high-end computing for generative artificial intelligence training at nearly one-third the price of hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft by large investors, neoclouds, or 'babyscalers'—boutique operators offering specialised infrastructure and flexible GPU rentals—are fast snagging business from Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. A study by digital infrastructure consultancy Uptime Institute showed that the average hourly cost of an Nvidia DGX H100 GPU system from a hyperscaler was $98, while neocloud players offer it at about $34—a 66% attractive prices, along with cheap data centre space and power in India, make a powerful case for neocloud companies to invest here, industry experts said. Sharad Agarwal, CEO of Chennai-based data centre services provider Sify Infinit Spaces, said neocloud companies are watching the Indian market keenly, especially because of the world's lowest rack rentals and power costs here. Many neocloud operators evolved from Bitcoin mining, gaming and high-frequency trading backgrounds. As AI chips grew in demand post ChatGPT's release in 2022, these firms quickly amassed thousands of chips to offer on Wall Street financiers have created a lucrative debt market for the neocloud firms which use the funds to acquire thousands of Nvidia chips and further rent out on hourly/monthly usage neocloud firms are cash rich. Large private equity firms like Blackstone, Carlyle and BlackRock have pumped in $11 billion in this new cohort of companies. Coreweave made an impressive $23-billion debut on Nasdaq this to semiconductor research firm Semianalysis, besides the four neocloud leaders, there are 131 emerging players in the segment globally who offer GPU rentals at discounted Infinit Spaces has introduced a pay-per-use pricing model, offering power and rack space to neocloud companies deploying GPU clusters in India. 'Our pay-per-use pricing model is a disruptor to the data centre industry,' Agarwal said. 'Huge entry cost is a barrier for emerging cloud infra firms to expand in foreign markets, and hence this pricing structure could derisk companies' fixed cost.'Hiranandani Group's Yotta Data Services – which by itself is India's sovereign neocloud -- said it has listed 8000 Nvidia H100 GPUs on Nvidia's marketplace alongside Lambda Labs, Coreweave and Nebius to offer their GPUs-as-a-service. 'This shift from hyperscalers to AI-specialised clouds is not just a competitive realignment—it's critical for democratising access to high-performance compute and accelerating innovation,' said Sunil Gupta, cofounder, CEO and managing director of Yotta Data Services, which has deployed its own sovereign neocloud with IndiaAI Mission, NIC, and Group's Blackbox said it is tapping North America and Europe expansion of neocloud firms to provide cabling, design, and construction services, and participate in their 'multi-billion gigawatt-scale expansion.'Blackbox is also pursuing global rollouts of gigawatt-scale campuses of neocloud operators for a range of services. 'These include structured cabling, data centre design, and turnkey construction services for both greenfield and retrofit projects,' said Sanjeev Verma, president and CEO of Black current discussions are focused on North America and Europe markets, expansion in India is not a question of if, but when, Verma added. CtrlS Datacenters is also in early talks with neocloud firms 'to deploy GPU clusters in India, driven by increasing AI model training and inference workloads, especially in sectors like BFSI, healthcare and manufacturing,' said Ranjit Metrani, president, managed services, at CtrlS say it is the right time for India's infrastructure players to strike long-term partnerships with neocloud firms as the industry is growing rapidly and India is evolving to be one of the largest markets for AI use. 'Neocloud companies are gaining market share globally at an incredibly fast pace comparable to the early growth of hyperscalers,' said Jitesh Karlekar, director-research at real estate research and advisory firm JLL.'This is a fundamental shift in the cloud business model… Neocloud firms are architected for the AI-native era. They offer more specialised infrastructure, lower latency, flexible pricing, and are often better optimised for high-performance computing workloads.' Therefore, it is crucial for India's infrastructure players to catch on this momentum early,' he said.
Time of India
34 minutes ago
- Time of India
ET Graphics: AI has seen ‘unprecedented' growth
One of the most striking aspects of change is that the most valuable gobal companies are not telecommunications players any more, but technology companies. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Mary Meeker, called the 'Queen of the Internet', published her first trends report in five years, focused on AI. The report, published last week, used the word 'unprecedented' 64 currently general partner at Bond Capital and a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, underscored how fast AI is changing the world as we know of the most striking aspects of change is that the most valuable gobal companies are not telecommunications players any more, but technology companies. India has a place in the report too with Reliance Industries the sole Indian enterprise to figure in the Top 30 technology companies in 2025, along with giants such as Google, Nvidia and report, apart from showcasing the growth of AI, also gives a glimpse into what the next era of internet would look like and where countries like India stand. Swathi Moorthy dives deep to bring out the nuggets.
Time of India
43 minutes ago
- Time of India
Enterprises using AI as returns outweigh costs: Snowflake executive
Snowflake, listed in the New York stock exchange, is an AI data cloud platform with $3.5 billion in product revenue in FY25, and is doubling down on AI through partnerships with firms such as Canva and investments across products and people. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads There is no shortage of demand in AI as enterprises see return on investments by increasing productivity, reducing cost and automating more things even amid tough macroeconomic conditions, said Baris Gultekin, head of AI at Snowflake This also comes at the back increasing return on investments their customers are seeing. According to a recent report from Snowflake, for every dollar spent on AI, there is a 45% return on the investment.'We are seeing a lot of productivity gains. Ability to do things that used to take a long time is now possible. Certain things that used to require a lot of expertise are now easily accessible to others. So the ROI is clearly measured by our customers. Everyone is very cost conscious, and then they are very clearly seeing the returns on their investments,' Gultekin it comes to the Indian market, Gultekin said while the firm does not have specific India-focused products, multimodal and multilingual data benefits their products as well, he said. The company is also doing proof of concepts (POCs) with customers and working with them to build their applications to improve the return on investment on is also partnering with companies in the services industry. 'For instance, we have our own systems integrator partners that we work very closely with. They're all building solutions for joint customers. Ultimately, AI is moving so fast, and everyone is trying to run as fast as possible. Partnering with others who can bring expertise to a wide range of customers, is something we'd like to do, and we do,' he services are one the biggest customers for Snowflake, where they analyse large amounts of data. The company is also seeing a lot of demand from insurance and healthcare, where significant paperwork is involved and can be analysed to bring in efficiency. 'We are seeing demand in manufacturing and retail across the board. This is actually interesting because it's not really concentrated on a single industry,' Gultekin are a few challenges for the enterprise sector. 'Many companies are building products, and they need to make sure that they're able to evaluate them and observe them before they can get them ready for large-scale production,' Gultekin big challenge is data. 'AI is data hungry. Our customers need to be able to break down these data silos, to make sure that they're able to govern that access,' Gultekin the costs are coming down, GPUs are expensive, as companies host LLM models. 'We are optimising our usage and utilisation of these GPUs. Couple of weeks ago, we released an optimised version of Llama 3.1, where we were able to reduce the costs by 70% or so. We reflected that reduction back to the customer. So being able to take advantage of the open-source ecosystem and optimise how these models are used, allows us to reduce the cost to us, and then reflect the benefits back to the customer,' Gultekin said.
