Kathy Gibson reports from Tognana, Italy – Nvidia continues to drive the evolution of the IT industry, and the data centre in particular, at a speed most of us have not experienced before.
This is the word from Gio Albertazzi, CEO of Vertiv, talking about his key takeaways from GTC in Washington.
Speaking to delegates at Vertiv Week in Italy, Albertazzi says we are experiencing continual acceleration in the build-out of pre-engineering and pre-fabricated data centres to cater for the latest generation of chips, technologies and services.
He believes the industry will go forward on two tracks: one the traditional way of computing that will continue to be relevant; and the other that will accelerate with pre-engineered, full-scale Gigawatt deployments.
“I am very proud of Vertiv’s role in strengthening the data centre infrastructure.”
Albertazzi doesn’t write off Europe’s data centre future, but cautions the continent is as much as two years behind the US and some other parts of the world.
“Most of our conversations these days are around two dimensions of the data centre trajectory,” he says. “One dimension is where the demand is: how strong it is, how much capacity is being brought to the table, and who is most ready to support that capacity.
“The other is the technology, in the sense that the data centre industry is certainly evolving at a speed that many of us have not experienced before.”
Through these two lenses – demand and technology – Albertazzi points out that the US market is immensely strong at the moment, possible 12, 18 or even 24 months ahead of the rest of the world.
“We have made great strides in the US market in terms of growth and market share.”
Other parts of the world that Albertazzi says are accelerating well are parts of Asia, South-East Asia, Japan and Australia.
“We are happy about the volume of our commercial activity pipeline,” he says. “But the speed at which Europe is turning this pipeline, ideas and general market appetite into actual growth and opportunities is behind the rest of the world.”
He cites the main reasons for this as power availability, a complicated permitting situation and a big focus on the North American market.
Data centre vacancy rates are low in EMEA, but Albertazzi says we will start to see an acceleration.