The heated race to develop and deploy new large language models and AI products has seen innovation surge—and revenue soar—at companies supporting AI infrastructure. This year's Most Innovative Companies in computing include TSMC; the Taiwan-based fabricator's N3P chip offers the smallest, most densely packed transistor size yet, while the company Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) packaging technology is integral to AI accelerator chips, including Nvidia's Blackwell GPU. Lambda Labs' new 1-Click service provides on-demand, self-serve GPU clusters for large-scale model training without long-term contracts. SambaNova Systems takes another tack with its SambaNova Cloud, an "AI inference" service. Powered by the company's specialized RDU (reconfigurable dataflow unit) processor, the service makes running AI workloads (as opposed to AI model training) faster and more efficient than on GPU-powered systems.

Commercial data centers are also transforming to meet the demands of AI and high-performance computing applications. Aligned Data Centers has rolled out next-generation liquid-cooling systems, which use far less water and energy than air cooling, across its operations. Oxide Computer's hyperscale cloud computers combine compute, storage, and networking elements in a single plug-and-play package, allowing security-sensitive customers to run their own private cloud server within a data center. And Sima.ai introduced novel multi-modal AI chips for edge computing; they can analyze inputs from text, computer-vision images, and audio for use in self-driving vehicles, robotics, smart retail, healthcare, and other applications. Apart from AI, some of the most exciting technology developments took place in quantum computing, with companies large and small taking different approaches to building utility-scale systems. They included trapped-ion specialist Quantinuum and "neutral atom"-focused startup Atom Computing. Following its 2023 unveiling of two of the largest quantum…

Adam Bluestein

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