Latest news with #AlexanderHarrowell
Business Wire
7 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Omdia: China Hyperscalers Commercialize AI Amid Export Restrictions but Modern GPUs Remain Limited
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--What are the biggest cloud providers in Asia doing to meet the rising demand for AI inference? Omdia's latest research offers an in-depth look at the evolving challenges of AI inference operations, the key trade-offs between throughput, latency, and support for diverse AI models, and the possible solutions. The report provides detailed coverage of companies such as Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, NAVER, and SK Telecom Enterprise. It examines which GPUs, AI accelerators, and AI-optimized CPUs these companies offer, their pricing, the stockpile of NVIDIA GPUs, their AI service portfolios, and the current status of their own AI models and custom chip projects. Despite heavy stockpiling of NVIDIA H800 and H20 GPUs during 2024 and early 2025, prior to the imposition of US export controls, these high-performance chips are difficult to find in Chinese cloud services, suggesting they are primarily used for the hyperscalers' own model development projects. Similarly, there are relatively few options that use any of the Chinese AI chip projects; exceptions include Baidu's on-premises cloud products and some Huawei Cloud services, although they remain limited. Chinese hyperscale companies are well advanced in adopting best practices such as decoupled prefill and generation and publish seminal research in fundamental AI; however, the research papers often mention that the training runs are carried out using Western GPUs, with a few notable exceptions. 'The real triumph in Chinese semiconductors has been CPUs rather than accelerators,' says Omdia Principal Analyst and author of the report, Alexander Harrowell. 'Chinese Arm-based CPUs are clearly in production at scale and are usually optimized for parallel workloads in a way like Amazon Web Services' Graviton series. Products such as Alibaba's YiTian 710 offer an economically attractive solution for serving the current generation of small AI models such as Alibaba Qwen3 in the enterprise, where the user base is relatively small and workload diversity is high.' If modern GPUs are required, the strongest offering Omdia found was the GPU-as-a-service product SK Telecom is building in partnership with Lambda Labs. Omdia observed significant interest in moving Chinese workloads outside the great firewall in hopes of accessing modern GPUs and potentially additional training data. Among other important findings, nearly all companies now offer models-as-a-service platforms that enable fine-tuning and other customizations, making this one of the most common ways for enterprises to access AI capabilities. Chinese hyperscalers are especially interested in supporting AI applications at the edge. For example, ByteDance, offers a pre-packaged solution to monitor restaurant kitchens and report whether chefs are wearing their hats. ABOUT OMDIA Omdia, part of Informa TechTarget, Inc. (Nasdaq: TTGT), is a technology research and advisory group. Our deep knowledge of tech markets grounded in real conversations with industry leaders and hundreds of thousands of data points, make our market intelligence our clients' strategic advantage. From R&D to ROI, we identify the greatest opportunities and move the industry forward.
Business Wire
10-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
IQM's State of Quantum 2025: Quantum Industry Must Solve Talent Shortage and Software Platforms, Not Just Qubits
ESPOO, Finland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--IQM Quantum Computers in collaboration with analyst firm Omdia (LON:INF), today unveiled the third edition of its State of Quantum Report, revealing that the quantum industry must address talent shortages and software development kits (SDK) gaps in order to scale beyond just qubit count. As quantum computing shifts from theoretical promise to practical integration, the report projects that the global quantum computing market will reach over $22 billion by 2032 as commercial deployments accelerate. The findings also show that 75% of respondents believe that defining the right applications is the most critical factor for adoption. As Dr. Jan Goetz, Co-CEO and Co-founder of IQM, noted in his foreword, 'Quantum's promise is clear, but fulfilling it requires orchestrated progress across the hardware and software stack—transforming these powerful machines from niche tools into drivers of real-world outcomes.' The report also argues that progress hinges on synchronising hardware industrialisation with software platform maturity. Today, software development kit fragmentation hampers portability and slows adoption in multi-vendor settings. HPC, Quantum, and AI Integration The report also highlights how high-performance computing (HPC), quantum computing, and AI are converging to drive the next wave of growth. According to industry experts, investors, and users across Europe, North America, Asia, and Oceania interviewed, HPC provides the robust infrastructure and orchestration needed to integrate quantum systems into real-world environments, ensuring that quantum and classical resources work in harmony. This synergy promises to accelerate adoption, amplify returns for early adopters, and transform quantum computing from a niche capability into a trusted part of the broader scientific and industrial toolbox. 'Our interviewees identified three major challenges – one is getting to the level of reliability where quantum computers can be considered industrial products rather than crafted laboratory devices, another is improving the software layer to provide the sort of developer experience we see in the high-level frameworks used for AI, and a third is helping users identify opportunities to benefit from quantum computer and set up their experiments. Interestingly, the interviewees are expecting multiple quantum technologies to co-exist, with a degree of specialisation between them,' said Alexander Harrowell, Principal Analyst, Advanced Computing at Omdia. Key Findings and Market Trends Sector Readiness: 57% of survey respondents placed drug-discovery and molecular-modelling workloads as their top quantum priority list, ahead of finance and chemicals. Funding: After a dip in 2023, venture funding surged again in 2024, with 58% of cumulative quantum venture funding still flowing to North American firms, with average deal sizes ($38M) triple those in Europe ($12M). Challenges Ahead: Talent shortages in quantum and growth-stage funding outside the US are the two biggest systemic risks to the industry's continued growth. In addition, the report also calls for three critical priorities to turn these insights into tangible outcomes: Better Abstraction Layers: Bridging the gap between the physics of qubits and the practical problems that matter to businesses. Unified Orchestration and Scheduling: Enabling quantum and classical HPC resources to operate seamlessly together. Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Fostering teams that blend quantum expertise, domain knowledge, and software development—creating a new generation of problem-solvers. Download the full report here: State of Quantum 2025 Report. About IQM Quantum Computers: IQM is a global leader in superconducting quantum computers. IQM provides both on-premises full-stack quantum computers and a cloud platform to access its computers. IQM customers include the leading high-performance computing centres, research labs, universities and enterprises which have full access to IQM's software and hardware. IQM has over 300 employees with headquarters in Finland and a global presence in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Spain, Singapore, South Korea and the United States.
