Hello Reader,

If you're new here, a very warm welcome! I've realised I’ve been neglecting to greet new readers lately - you have my sincere apologies.

This newsletter lands in your inbox every Sunday morning with a digest of my weekly stories. Since the start of the year, I’ve also been writing longer opening messages.

My goal is simple: to share what I’m working on and what I’m observing in the technology landscape, and to get you thinking and seeing things in a new light.

The future of data centres is linked to AI

It’s been a hectic week as I prepared for and delivered two presentations I had previously committed to. One was to a senior group of executives and leaders in the data centre industry, who took time out of their busy schedules to gather in Batam.

Among other things, I shared my thoughts on how AI is influencing data centre designs across Southeast Asia. AI inference is also set to make a bigger impact, as chip makers like Groq gain traction with their 20kW rack "LPU" chips, which deliver better inference performance than traditional GPUs.

Of course, past trends offer little guidance when forecasting AI data centre demand. Given the unpredictable mix of evolving GPU capabilities, shifting AI model performance, and inevitable breakthroughs, using the past to predict the future isn’t just unreliable - it’s guaranteed to be wrong.

Is CloudMatrix Huawei's DeepSeek moment?

I also shared at a closed-door Huawei roundtable as part of Huawei's Singapore Technology Week 2025. One highlight from the session: what I heard about Huawei’s CloudMatrix supercomputer confirms how impressive it really is.

Apparently, CloudMatrix supports some form of RDMA, enabling direct memory access across CPUs. This is incredible as it's a scale-up solution with a dozen racks for compute, interconnected by 6,912 of 400G fibre optic ports.

And Huawei will soon be bringing its AI cloud to Singapore, marking its first region outside of China.

AI will change how we work

Years ago, during the year of my major "O" level exams, I took it upon myself to embark on the sacred task of teaching myself C programming. The reason was simple: MajorMUD, an online, text-based multi-user dungeon game that I absolutely had to keep playing in order to level up.

Since I was still expected to show up at school every day, I figured the best way to get ahead was to write a program that could play the game for me. So, while everyone else was buried in revision notes and the Ten-Year Series, I was buried in variables, data types, arrays, functions, and conditional loops.

It was glorious to see the software I wrote actually working. Thankfully, I also passed all the papers I needed to. Some years later, I even wrote a free DLL plugin for the Winamp media player. Someone actually kept an archive of it here.

Of course, much as I enjoy programming, I’ll readily admit I’m not all that great at it. So when I recently decided to upgrade the Airtable system I created to track my workflow (and earnings), I turned to AI.

The result blew me away. The pseudocode I tapped out at a carpark was transformed into usable code, with no more trawling through API docs, fixing typos, or checking syntax line by line. This is just one small example of how AI is changing things slowly but irrevocably.