AI-capable PC sales, Norway’s wealth fund and sustainability in traffic are this week’s top stories
1-14% of PCs shipped are AI-capable
Microsoft calls it Copilot + PC, while Intel says AI PC. Here is the thing: 14% of PCs shipped globally in Q2 2024 are AI-capable, according to Canalys, a consultancy. The company announced 8.8 million AI-capable PCs were shipped in Q2 2024. These gadgets are defined as desktops and notebooks that include a chipset or block for dedicated AI workloads, such as an NPU, namely neural processing unit.
“June saw the launch of Copilot+ PCs incorporating Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series of chips, based on Arm architecture. While shipment volumes in the quarter were relatively small due to the limited weeks and geographical coverage of availability, the broad commitment of Windows OEMs to adopt these products into their portfolios bodes well for the category’s outlook. In the x86 space, Intel ramped up its delivery of Core Ultra chipsets, reporting strong sequential performance for its AI PC products, while AMD announced its Ryzen AI 300 series of notebook processors in June, with product releases starting in mid-July,” said Ishan Dutt, Principal Analyst at Canalys.
As for the vendors’ market share for AI-capable PCs, HP has 8%, Dell 7% and Lenovo 6%. Canalys emphasizes that an AI-capable PC is a device that costs USD800 and above.
2- Google’s use of AI in traffic lights to fight fuel emissions
Google’s sustainability effort, Project Green Light, saves fuel and lowers emissions for 30 million car rides per month and aims to reduce emissions at city intersections by 10%. I read this story at Sustainability Magazine and the project is already in place cities including Abu Dhabi, Kolkata, Seattle, Manchester and Hamburg.
Here’s how, basically, Project Green Light works: Google uses driving trends from Google Maps and AI to model traffic patterns and build intelligent recommendations for city traffic engineers. These recommendations can be implemented in as little as five minutes using existing infrastructure, according to the story. (I have a story here about Google, which is about extra fee charges in Turkey)
Alon Harris, Senior Climate AI Program Manager at Google, says: “In order to achieve a positive climate impact, we want to be able to deploy high-quality Green Light recommendations to many cities globally and scale fast. We purposely set up everything to be simple and lightweight — cities don’t need to invest in any dedicated software or hardware integrations. We just share our recommendations with the city and then they evaluate them and take action. Tests so far show it has the potential to reduce stops by 30% and greenhouse gas emissions by 10%.”
3-Norway’s wealth fund made $138B profit from tech investments
Norway’s wealth a $138 billion profit from tech investments first half of the year. I saw this story at The Next Web and world’s largest wealth fund, with USD1.6 trillion, credited the gains to investments in tech that are driven by surging demand for AI, technology shares went up during early 2024. Nvidia brought the largest returns, while Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and TSMC also helped in big sums, the story said.
26% of the fund’s equity investments come from tech., escalating fears about their financial futures. Tech shares have plummeted in recent weeks. The fund’s CEO, Nicolai Tangen, expects that worse is still to come. Tangen has several anxieties about the market. One is the rising levels of sovereign debt, which can cause markets to plunge, added the story.
