03/09/2026

BIZ & FINANCE THURSDAY | SEPT 3, 2026

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Power, cooling firms ride data centre boom

John Ternus takes helm as Apple eyes AI,

foldable phones SAN FRANCISCO: John Ternus took over as Apple’s CEO on Tuesday, inheriting a company that towers over the smartphone market but trails its rivals in artificial intelligence. One of his biggest challenges will be balancing the company’s dependence on China while parrying acute political pressure from the White House. The handover ends Tim Cook’s 15-year run, replacing the operations specialist who built Apple’s supply chain with the engineer who built its hardware. Ternus, 51, joined Apple’s design team in 2001 and worked his way up to senior vice-president of hardware engineering, reporting to Cook. He leads the engineering teams behind Apple’s entire product lineup, including the iPhones that generate most of the company’s revenue. He gets barely a week to settle in, with Apple holding its annual iPhone event on Sept 9, where it is expected to unveil its first foldable handset. “Tim Cook left the house in phenomenal order,“ said Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at investment firm Yorkville Ives & Co. “But now it’s about Ternus defining the AI chapter.” Ives expects the new CEO to lean into what he knows. “There’s no reason to fix what’s already working,“ he said, predicting Ternus will concentrate on hardware innovation while leaving Cook’s supply chain intact. Some analysts had argued software chief Craig Federighi was the more logical pick for a company scrambling to catch up on AI. Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies, said that misreads how consumers actually adopt technology. “Consumers are still buying hardware first, and it’s going to be like that for a long time,“ she said. “You’re not going to discover the value of AI if you’re not interested in the hardware.” Cook echoed that sentiment in a final memo to employees on Monday. “Few people understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way John does,“ Cook wrote. Ternus earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an engineer at Virtual Research Systems before joining Apple. Inside the company he is credited with driving a push to make products more durable, reliable and resilient, and with design work that cut their carbon footprint. The harder question is what kind of leader he becomes. “Even people that know him now don’t know him as a CEO,“ Milanesi said. “You might know him as the head of engineering, but once you’re CEO, things change. Your responsibility is bigger, your power is bigger. You’re dancing a different kind of dance.” Ternus’ base salary will be US$3 million (RM12 million) – the same amount Cook received when he was CEO – but stock options could increase total compensation to US$58 million in his first year, according to a securities filing on Tuesday. Cook’s salary will decrease to US$2 million, while his total compensation over the next year could be worth US$47 million, according to the filing. Cook’s total compensation for 2025 exceeded US$74 million. Nowhere is that gap wider than in the geopolitical role Cook excelled at, courting both Beijing and Donald Trump’s White House to protect a supply chain that runs largely through China. Apple’s manufacturing operation is among the most complex in corporate history, a web of hundreds of suppliers and assembly lines that Cook painstakingly built over decades. – AFP

The model, called Astra, can spot more security vulnerabilities than the most advanced OpenAI model publicly available today, company officials told reporters on a conference call on Tuesday. Astra also needs less computational power to accomplish those tasks. “With the right tools and access, Astra can find previously unknown security flaws and develop ways to exploit them across many well protected systems without a person guiding each step,“ said Amelia Glaese, an OpenAI vice president overseeing its safety work. The company plans to make Astra available “soon” to a limited group, but declined to provide specifics. Glaese said the extra security measures may “sometimes slow, pause, or stop legitimate work,“ and that HONG KONG: While Nvidia is synonymous with the AI boom, a lesser-known group of power and cooling equipment suppliers is cashing in on a global data centre construction spree as developers race to avoid infrastructure bottlenecks. Energy-hungry data centres have triggered a surge in demand for equipment ranging from transformers to advanced cooling systems, creating winners across Asia’s supply chain, though earlier stock-price gains have moderated. McKinsey forecasts nearly US$7 trillion (RM28 trillion) in data-centre investment globally by 2030; Nvidia last week said it expects AI spending to remain robust for years. But building data centres fast enough to meet demand is becoming more difficult. Hyperscalers often want facilities delivered within six months, but grid connection delays can stretch as long as 24 months in some emerging markets and more than eight years in major developed markets, according to consultancy Pivotale AI. “Outside the industry circle, people are talking about (graphics processing units), but within the circle, people most certainly question you about the lead time for generators and transformers,” said Wing Kin Cheung, the CEO of digital infrastructure service provider BodaData. Transformers convert high-voltage electricity from grids into levels suitable for servers, cooling systems and power distribution units. Leading transformer suppliers including South Korea’s HD Hyundai Electric and China’s Hainan Jinpan Smart Technology reported surging demand in the first half of 2026 tied to AI infrastructure projects, particularly in North America. HD Hyundai Electric recently said demand in Europe was rising as US hyperscalers expanded investments in markets like Finland, Germany and Britain, while Middle Eastern demand remained strong. Its order backlog rose 23% to US$8.5 billion at the end of June from six months earlier, and o AI growth drives strong demand for transformers and advanced equipment

New data centre designs, including floating and underwater facilities, could create more business opportunities for suppliers. – SUNBIZ PIX

Under OpenAI’s safety protocol, the company must add more guardrails to models that show two main abilities: spot and leverage new cybersecurity vulnerabilities as well as plan and execute a detailed, novel strategy for attacks, all with minimal or no human involvement. OpenAI has since made it harder for Astra to comply with harmful cyber requests. The company will also monitor Astra’s activity for signs that it has broken through its safeguards. Saachi Jain, who oversees safety at OpenAI, said the AI lab is constantly calibrating how effective AI agents should be in executing tasks. She tells her team that AI models should “know your bounds” but that drawing the line can be complicated. “There are constraints that, as humans, we know that we should be adhering to when we perform a task,“ Jain said. “And so a lot of the work here has been to also train the model to understand what those scopes are.” – Reuters The bank forecasts liquid cooling will account for 70% of new AI data-centre installations versus air cooling by 2030, up from about 30% today. Liquid cooling can reduce energy consumption by over 27%, McKinsey says. Developers are also exploring unconventional approaches, including floating facilities, underwater data centres and servers in caves or tunnels. That is creating opportunities for a broader range of suppliers. forecasts that Chinese companies will gain share thanks to technological expertise and cost advantages. HD Hyundai Electric and Jinpan said they are deepening SST development, while Taiwan’s Delta Electronics, a major supplier of power infrastructure, said a small data centre is using its SSTs. Delta told Reuters that demand for AI power, cooling and data centre infrastructure solutions remains a growth engine and it is expanding its production footprint across Thailand, the US and China to meet increased demand. Cooling systems are emerging as another growth area as operators struggle to manage the heat generated by powerful AI chips. “Power and cooling basically go hand in hand; so basically the more power you use, the more cooling you need to use because you generate heat,” said Matty Zhao, Bank of America’s Asia-Pacific head of research for basic materials, oil and gas.

Astra is the first OpenAI model to trigger the tougher safeguards mandated by the company’s safety protocol, a threshold that, until now, had remained theoretical. The announcement comes as OpenAI navigates heightened scrutiny over its ability to control increasingly powerful AI systems. The ChatGPT maker recently sparked a broader debate about AI safety after its AI agents broke out of their testing arena and hacked open-source platform Hugging Face. The incident prompted OpenAI to pause much of its model development for two weeks to bolster its defences. Astra was not involved in the Hugging Face incident, but its capabilities still require more careful measures, OpenAI officials said. The AI lab said it restarted its largest model training run on Aug 28, but that it is holding back on some smaller experiments. it said it expects data centre demand to remain robust. “We currently have an order backlog covering more than three years, with a substantial portion of production capacity for major power equipment secured for the coming three years,” the company told Reuters. “We are also in order discussions with some key customers for volumes scheduled for delivery as far out as 2030.” For Jinpan, new data-centre orders in the first half more than quadrupled from a year earlier, while its related backlog nearly tripled. As AI chips consume more electricity, equipment makers are also betting on technologies aimed at improving efficiency and reducing environmental impacts, amid growing public scrutiny over data centres’ consumption of water and electricity. Bank of America estimates power consumption per AI rack could climb to more than 1.5 megawatts by the end of 2030, nearly 100 times that of a conventional rack, citing Nvidia’s roadmap. One technology attracting greater attention is the solid-state transformer (SST), a device that replaces bulky magnetic coils and copper windings with semiconductors to transform and route electricity. UBS estimates SSTs will increase power efficiency by around 4% and reduce costs. While commercial adoption remains in its early stages, the bank expects their penetration to climb to 40% in 2030 and

OpenAI says new model is so capable it requires stronger guardrails SAN FRANCISCO: OpenAI has determined that one of its upcoming models is so capable it requires additional safety measures before it can be launched. OpenAI would work to minimize those disruptions.