This week's technology headlines span the full spectrum of the industry's biggest pressure points. AMD used its Advancing AI event to unveil a sweeping new hardware and software lineup, new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham reshaped Whitehall's tech department, MongoDB explored how retailers respond to World Cup swings in real time, and New York State hit pause on hyperscale data centre growth as power constraints bite.
AMD Unveils New Hardware and Software at Advancing AI
Dr Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, and her team unveiled a wide range of hardware and software innovations at the company's Advancing AI event, aimed at powering the next wave of data centres, enterprise workloads and physical AI systems.
The announcements covered everything from sixth-generation EPYC CPUs and Instinct MI400 GPUs to a new ROCm.ai developer suite, marking a significant step in AMD's push toward an open AI ecosystem.
Su highlighted that the industry is now consuming more than 35 quadrillion tokens every month, with the majority of that capacity now devoted to inference rather than training — a shift she attributed to the rise of agentic AI, where each task can involve dozens of steps and requires substantial GPU and CPU resources to orchestrate.
"AI is the most important technology in the last 50 years."— Dr Lisa Su, CEO, AMD
Burnham Scraps DSIT But Names First UK AI Minister
New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has closed the government's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), folding most of its responsibilities into the business department.
As part of the new PM's promise of a pro-business administration, former business secretary Jonathan Reynolds will lead the newly created Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade.
Other DSIT functions move to what will become the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, led by Lisa Nandy. The restructuring proceeded despite pushback from technology entrepreneurs and industry leaders who had urged the government to keep DSIT intact.
Scale Computing Advances Edge AI with AMD CPUs
Edge computing provider Scale Computing is adding support for AMD CPU-based infrastructure, including AMD EPYC and Ryzen processors, in version 9.7 of its SC//HyperCore virtualisation suite.
The update broadens deployment options for Scale Computing's edge solutions, making it easier to run virtualised and AI-enabled workloads closer to where data is generated. The company's SC//Reliant edge-as-a-service platform already runs on AMD CPUs for retail and distributed edge environments, deepening the collaboration between the two firms and giving customers broader platform choice across the edge, the data centre and distributed enterprise settings.
MongoDB: How AI Helps Retailers Pivot to World Cup Results
Genevieve Broadhead, Global Industry Lead at MongoDB, explains how modern technology lets brands adjust storefronts, promotions and supply chains in real time to keep pace with the emotional swings of live sporting events.
Retailers have traditionally relied on historical sales data to plan stock levels for events like the World Cup, using patterns from previous tournaments to estimate demand for items such as beer or jerseys. But that kind of modelling only sets a baseline — it breaks down the moment a match kicks off.
Broadhead argues the real differentiator now is the ability to respond to real-time signals: a losing team can send fans heading home early, while a winning one can spark a surge in food and drink orders as the celebration continues.