Quantum #101

Google dropped its new H4D, HPC optimized, VM instance with zero fan fare last week. So now we have two 5^th generation (Turin) AMD CPU HPC VMs in the cloud, Released in the space of as many weeks. I thought Google would have made more noise about this but it went GA in a quiet release note and little else. 

You’re waiting for me to drop some comparison benchmarks now aren’t you? 😆 Patience… maybe later this week?

Next Platform gave us a pretty nice analysis of CPU based HPC in the cloud by looking at AWS’ VMs, triggered I guess by the release of the HPC8a last week. It’s a shame it didn’t go wider and include the other two major CSPs but is a good read nonetheless 

AMD seem to be cementing their position by inking a deal with Meta for GPUs to go along with last week’s CPU announcement. Either that or they’re getting good at playing the press release game and the deal does look remarkably similar to the one drawn up for OpenAI last year.

VAST Data managed to get a huge amount of column inches this week by including a GPU into their storage fabric. I guess that provides another use case for GPUs if the AI demand ever tails off…

I talked a lot about AI coding last week, which wasn’t really intentional. I guess it’s just what was top of mind. (It’s definitely getting harder to find and talk about HPC news that isn’t just AI news rebranded). What’s quite interesting is after having published our piece on vibe coding in HPC I came across several social media posts and videos echoing similar sentiments. This is an interesting shift away from the hype at the start of the year… Perhaps something I’ll talk about more in our next update on HAL.

In The News

Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC.

HPC Cloud Updates WE 01 Mar 2026

Updates to AWS, Azure & GCP in the last week relevant for HPC practitioners. Some confidential and bare metal variants of VMs and lots more types in more places. Oh and Google’s H4D is now available!

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

Next Platform has a good write up on the AWS HPC VM types

CPU-Only Compute Still Matters To A Lot Of HPC Centers

It has taken three decades for HPC to move to the cloud, and the truth is that a lot of simulation and modeling applications are still coded to run on

nextplatformTimothy Prickett Morgan

AMD and Meta expand on their CPU deal from last week to include lots of GPUs in a deal that smells very much like that between OpenAI and AMD last year

AMD and Meta Expand Partnership with 6 GW of AMD GPUs for AI Infrastructure

AMD’s strategic struggle to carve out a growing piece of the GPU pie from market dominator NVIDIA took a positive turn for the challenger today with the announcement that AMD and Meta have agreed to a 6-gigawatt deal for AMD Instinct GPUs in an agreement estimated at $100 billion. The companies said ..... - Read more from Inside HPC & AI News.

Inside HPC & AI News | High-Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligencestaff

VAST got a lot of attention, most of related to this

https://www.hpcwire.com/2026/02/25/vast-adds-gpus-into-clusters-with-cnode-x/

From HMx Labs

Lots of talk about vibe coding this week it seems, both from us in the form of an update on our HPC vibe coding experiment and using it to do COBOL migrations

HAL Update: A Confidence Game

An update on HAL, the HPC Vibe Coding experiment. One step forward and two steps back?

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

Vibing Banking Software

Some thoughts on the impact of LLMs in developing banking software in light of Anthropic’s recent COBOL announcement.

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

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