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The December 5 Deep Tech Alliance Explore 2024 conference in Paris focused on how collaboration between corporates and deep tech startups can help transform
manufacturing as well as the energy, health and public utilities sectors.
The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief moderated a panel (pictured here) entitled The Shift to Smart Factories. Panelists included executives from Bosch, The Würth Group, a global market leader in fastening and assembly materials, Force Technology, a technology consultancy and service company, and two AI startups: IPercept and Phantamsa Labs.
Read on to get some the key takeaways.

To understand the current state of Extended Reality (XR), an umbrella term to referring to augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR), look no further than your neighborhood Walmart.
The global retailer was a pioneer in introducing AR experiences in Roblox, a virtual world, but is now testing the tech on a more mainstream audience, because, it says, retail today goes beyond just online and in-store shopping, or even a combination of both.
In October Walmart revealed proprietary artificial intelligence, Generative AI, Augmented Reality and Immersive Commerce platforms it is leveraging to create hyper-personalized, convenient and engaging shopping experiences across its stores, Sam’s Clubs, apps and other virtual environments.
Walmart’s announcement illustrates how XR is starting to become a part of consumers’ retail experience, says Andreea Danielescu, a technologist with 10 patents who until recently was the Director of the Future Technologies R&D group at Accenture Lab, which focuses on new emerging technologies that blend the physical and digital.

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Global Sustainable Transformation (GST), a spin-off from the Technical University Munich, replaces conventional raw materials such as cocoa butter, palm oil, and sunflower oil in food cosmetic and oleochemicals, with cutting edge biotechnology. Its patented FHCR technology, a platform that enables the production of triglycerides, bioactives, and bio-based polymers for various applications, is centered around a unique fermentation process which transforms organic waste streams into high-value intermediates for a circular bioeconomy. Applications include food, cosmetics and biofuels. The company says it is in the process of closing deals with a large European supermarket chain and a U.S. oleochemicals manufacturer.
“Our technology enables highly efficient, waste-free, low-carbon production and solves supply chain issues,” says GST founder Dr. Mahmoud Masri.
GST is one of 60+ startups that will be pitching to investors and industry leaders at the December 10 Ultimate Demo Day at Unternehmertum, the start-up lab of the Technical University of Munich.

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Italian startup iGenius and Nvidia, opens ne said December 5 that they are planning to bring online one of the world's biggest deployments of Nvidia's newest servers by the middle of next year in a data center in southern Italy.

The iGenius Colosseum supercomputer features NVIDIA DGX GB200 systems containing thousands of NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Superchips designed for real-time trillion-parameter inference and training.

iGenius said it will use the Colosseum supercomputer to build advanced AI applications, including training open-source generative AI and trillion-plus-parameter large language models. Colosseum will feature state-of-the-art liquid cooling. It is expected to deliver 115 exaflops of computational performance (115,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second), all powered by renewable energy from Italy.
Colosseum said the new AI data center will provide a foundation for the next phase of iGenius’ collaboration with Nvidia to develop AI models to support industry use cases that require maximum data security, reliability and accuracy, such as financial consulting, patient services, and government planning.