China is Getting Banned Blackwell? | The Gestalt IT Rundown: March 5, 2025

I want to take you back to the halcyon days of just a few weeks ago when we discussed the ways that NVIDIA AI chips were showing up in China even though they were under US embargo not to be able to get this advanced technology. This came as a result of a last minute policy decision from the outgoing Biden administration that blocked the Chinese from buying these chips. Now, companies like Microsoft are urging the new presidential administration to rescind the ban to give them access to the growing AI market in China. Chinese authorities are firing back at the ban by telling their researchers to avoid visiting the US. And third parties are making a fortune reshipping shipments of restricted items to China from places like Singapore, where police just arrested three men charged with running an operation of that nature. This and more on the Rundown.

1:35 – Intel Pushes Ohio Fab Again to 2030

Intel’s future Ohio fabrication facility is going to be pushed a little further into the future. The factory is now projected to be opening in 2030. The original opening date was supposed to be this year but Intel has faced a number of delays so far. Reports about the delay mention the recent financial struggles that Intel has been facing as the cause for the delay. There is also uncertainty around the CHIPS Act funding that would have been used for the investment in the plant.

4:45 – Nokia Acquires Infinera

Nokia has completed the acquisition of Infinera, one of the largest optics companies in the industry. The team from Infinera will become a part of Optical Networks business while former CEO David Heard will be joining the Network Infrastructure Group as Chief Strategic Growth Officer. The acquisition was announced back in June 2024.

7:55 – Qualcomm and IBM Raise GenAI Competitive Stakes

Qualcomm Technologies and IBM plan to run watsonx.govenance, Granite Guardian 8B, and Granite 3.1 8B models on a Snapdragon 8 Elite reference design and the Qualcomm Dragonwing AI On-Prem Appliance Solution with the Qualcomm AI Inference Suite.

Read More: MWC 2025: Qualcomm and IBM Raise GenAI Competitive Stakes

11:00 – Microsoft hangs up on Skype

One of the pioneering Internet services is going to be shut down in May. Microsoft announced that Skype will be sunset on May 5, 2025. The VoIP tool has been around for over 20 years and at one time boasted some 300 million users. Microsoft bought the company back in 2011 and has slowly been migrating users and features to their more commercial offerings. Microsoft announced that users should begin migrating their contacts and chat data to Microsoft Teams, which itself is an descendant of the Skype for Business play that Microsoft used some ten years ago.

14:56 – US Enterprises waste $44.5B on needless cloud spend

20:13 – Aviz Next ONES to Support Spectrum-X

Waste seems to be a big buzzword as of late and the enteprise cloud market is no stranger to waste. According to a report from IT Pro, enterprises are set to spend an extra $44.5 billion on needless cloud spend. The report says that 21% of the spend is from underutilized resources. A whopping 52% blamed waste on a lack of synergy between developers and FinOps teams. It’s no surprise to learn that comes because developers see cost optimization as someone else’s problem and they tend to overprovision to get things done as fast as possible.

24:44 – China is Getting Banned Blackwell?