Data Centres, Compute & Cloud

1945 · 81 years ago

ENIAC began operation as the first general-purpose electronic computer

Built to calculate artillery firing tables, it occupied a large room and needed a team to reprogram by rewiring, but it established that electronic computation at scale was possible, the starting point from which later compute infrastructure descended.

1961 · 65 years ago

MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System let multiple users access a single computer remotely for the first time

Time-sharing replaced the practice of feeding a computer one job at a time, showing that computing power could be divided among many simultaneous users, the conceptual root of remote, on-demand computing services.

1972 · 54 years ago

IBM's VM operating systems introduced virtual machines, letting one computer serve many users as if each had a dedicated machine

Virtualisation let a single mainframe be divided into many isolated environments, a concept that lay dormant for decades before becoming the technical foundation that made multi-tenant cloud computing commercially practical.

1976 · 50 years ago

The Cray-1 defined the supercomputer as a distinct category of machine built solely for large-scale computation

Seymour Cray's design, notable for its speed and distinctive circular shape, established a lineage of dedicated high-performance machines built for scientific and, later, weather and weapons simulation that modern AI training clusters descend from.

1994 · 32 years ago

General Magic coined the 'cloud' metaphor for virtualised services

General Magic used the cloud metaphor for the universe of 'places' that mobile agents in its Telescript environment could go. The usage is credited to communications specialist David Hoffman, drawing on long-standing networking and telecom convention.

1996 · 30 years ago

Compaq Computer Corporation drew up a business plan around cloud computing-enabled applications

Compaq's plan for future computing and the Internet popularised the expression 'cloud computing'. It foresaw commercial success for online consumer file storage, prompting Compaq to sell server hardware to internet service providers.

1999 · 27 years ago

Salesforce pioneered delivering enterprise software as an on-demand internet service

Its subscription model, run from the provider's own servers rather than installed on a customer's machines, established the software-as-a-service pattern that later became a standard way of delivering cloud-hosted applications and compute.

2002 · 24 years ago

Japan's Earth Simulator became the world's fastest supercomputer

Built to model climate and seismic activity, it held the top ranking for over two years, the last time a non-American machine led global supercomputing until Chinese systems took the lead more than a decade later.

2002 · 24 years ago

Amazon established Amazon Web Services

AWS was set up to allow developers to build applications independently, marking the practical emergence of cloud computing in the 2000s. It became the foundation of the commercial public cloud market.

2004 · 22 years ago

Google engineers published the MapReduce and Google File System papers

The papers described how to split enormous computing jobs across thousands of ordinary machines, an architecture that the wider industry, including the open-source Hadoop project, copied and that underpins hyperscale cloud computing to this day.

2006 · 20 years ago

Amazon launched EC2 and S3, founding public cloud computing as a mass-market utility

Renting server capacity and storage by the hour let startups and later large enterprises avoid buying their own data centres, a shift in the economics of computing that Microsoft, Google and, later, Chinese providers all followed.

2008 · 18 years ago

NASA developed the first open-source software for private and hybrid clouds

NASA produced the first open-source stack for deploying private and hybrid cloud environments. This opened cloud deployment beyond proprietary public providers.

2010 · 16 years ago

Microsoft launched Microsoft Azure

Azure gave Microsoft a full public cloud platform, establishing a major competitor to AWS. Its launch was part of a wave of cloud service introductions in the 2010s.

2010 · 16 years ago

Rackspace Hosting and NASA initiated the OpenStack open-source cloud project

OpenStack provided a shared open-source software base for building private and public clouds. It gave organisations and states an alternative to proprietary hyperscaler platforms.

2011 · 15 years ago

National Institute of Standards and Technology defined five essential characteristics and three cloud service models

NIST identified five essential characteristics of cloud systems and recognised IaaS, PaaS and SaaS as the core service models. This became the reference framework for procurement and regulation of cloud services.

2011 · 15 years ago

IBM introduced the IBM SmartCloud framework

IBM entered the cloud market with its SmartCloud framework. It was part of the broad shift of incumbent IT vendors into cloud provision.

2012 · 14 years ago

Oracle announced Oracle Cloud

Oracle announced its own cloud platform, extending the competitive field of major providers. It continued the migration of established enterprise software vendors into hosted infrastructure.

May 2025 · last year

The United States and the United Arab Emirates struck a deal allowing large-scale advanced chip exports to G42

The agreement, reached during a presidential visit to the Gulf, cleared the way for the Emirati firm G42 to import substantial volumes of advanced Nvidia processors for AI data centres, part of a wider set of Gulf compute agreements including Saudi Arabia.

• Saudi Arabia signed a parallel package with Nvidia and AMD

2025 · last year

Malaysia continued to draw hyperscale cloud investment into Johor

Microsoft, Google and regional cloud providers expanded data centre and compute capacity in Johor, building on earlier commitments and positioning Malaysia as a lower-cost alternative to Singapore for cloud and AI workloads serving Southeast Asia.

2025 · last year

Huawei scaled its Ascend AI chips into large domestic compute clusters despite US export controls

Chinese cloud providers deployed clusters built on thousands of Ascend processors to train and serve large models domestically, narrowing though not closing the gap with clusters built on restricted Nvidia hardware, and reducing reliance on smuggled or grey-market chips.

2025 · last year

South Korea's government committed public funding to a national AI computing centre

The project, developed with domestic technology groups, aimed to give Korean researchers and companies access to large-scale GPU capacity at home, echoing sovereign compute programmes announced by Japan, India and Gulf states over roughly the same period.

2025 · last year

Japan's government subsidised domestic GPU cluster build-out for sovereign AI compute

The trade ministry extended grants to domestic cloud providers including Sakura Internet to expand graphics processor capacity inside Japan, part of an economic security strategy intended to reduce dependence on foreign hyperscalers for AI training and inference.

2024 · 2 years ago

Cassava Technologies began building Africa's first large Nvidia GPU cluster

The pan-African group, working with Nvidia, opened AI compute capacity intended to let African researchers and businesses train and run models locally rather than renting capacity from cloud providers based in the United States, Europe or the Gulf.

Late 2024 · 2 years ago

The US Commerce Department tightened export controls on chipmaking equipment and high-bandwidth memory bound for China

Additional Chinese fabrication plants and toolmakers were added to restricted lists, extending earlier controls on advanced processors to the equipment and specialised memory needed to manufacture them, an escalation contested by allied toolmakers in Japan and the Netherlands.

2024–2025 · last year

Smuggling networks routed restricted AI processors to China through third countries

Investigations and export-control enforcement actions traced shipments of restricted Nvidia processors reaching China via Singapore, Malaysia and other transit points, prompting tighter reporting requirements for regional buyers even though most local demand was genuine.

• Nvidia tightened its own reseller checks

2024–2025 · last year

China's state-backed Big Fund directed a new investment round toward domestic chipmaking and compute capacity

The fund, one of several vehicles channelling state capital into semiconductors, backed equipment makers and chip designers as Beijing sought compute capacity that did not depend on foreign suppliers subject to export licensing.

2024–2025 · last year

India's IndiaAI Mission empanelled private data centres to offer subsidised GPU access to domestic developers

Firms including Yotta and E2E Networks were selected to supply graphics processors at government-negotiated rates, building a shared national compute pool intended to give startups and researchers access that they individually could not afford.

• The pool grew toward tens of thousands of GPUs

2023 · 3 years ago

International Organization for Standardization expanded cloud definitions in ISO/IEC 22123-2:2023

ISO refined the list of essential cloud characteristics and added service categories including Network, Communications, Compute and Data Storage as a Service. The standard also classified serverless computing alongside IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

2022 · 4 years ago

The United States passed the CHIPS and Science Act

The law committed tens of billions of dollars in subsidies and tax credits to rebuild domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research capacity, reflecting a bipartisan judgement that compute capacity was a strategic asset rather than an ordinary traded good.

• The European Union and Japan passed their own chip acts around the same time

December 2019 · 7 years ago

Amazon launched AWS Outposts

Outposts extended AWS infrastructure, services, APIs and tools into customer data centres, co-location spaces and on-premises facilities. It marked the hybrid convergence of public cloud and private infrastructure.

2016 · 10 years ago

China's Sunway TaihuLight became the world's fastest supercomputer while built entirely on domestic processors

The machine topped the global TOP500 ranking using Chinese-designed chips rather than American processors, demonstrating that indigenous high-performance computing was achievable and foreshadowing the compute self-sufficiency drive that followed later export controls.

October 2014 · 12 years ago

Dropbox suffered a breach with seven million passwords stolen

Hackers stole over seven million Dropbox user passwords, seeking payment in Bitcoin. Together with the 2014 iCloud leak, it highlighted the security exposure inherent in consumer cloud storage.

2012 · 14 years ago

European Commission identified obstacles impeding the cloud computing market

A Commission Communication set out several issues holding back development of the European cloud market. It marked early supranational policy attention to cloud capability.