Kathy Gibson reports from Vertiv Week in Zagreb – Artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads are driving massive growth in data centre builds.
Gautham Gnganajothi, senior vice-president and global head of best practice analytics at Frost and Sullivan, says we are seeing developments in colocation, hyperscaler and enterprise data centres.
“The data centre market is a $500-billion playing field today, growing at 12% CAGR,” he says, adding it is expected to reach as much as $1,5-trillion by 2035.
Importantly, much of this growth is for AI workloads, with four big hyperscalers now running AI workloads on 77% of their capacity today.
Looking forward, Gnanajothi says most new builds will be high-density AI compute with next-generation power architecture, advanced cooling, modularity, software-defined operations, sustainable infrastructure, grid-active data centres and a distributed AI infrastructure.
“This all leads to the nexus of the data centre, energy and compute,” he explains.
In the past, the data centre conversation was about capacity.
Today, we are seeing it evolve in three stages.
The first is when operators retrofit AI-capable infrastructure to adapt to higher-density racks. But there are limits to how fat that can be taken, Gnanajothi says.
A significant part of the market now is the AI-ready modular build. This is designed from the beginning around high density, liquid cooling and modularity. This lets operators scale quicker, for less cost.
But power is still a hurdle, Gnanajothi says, so stage three will be AI-native, grid-interactive campuses.
Compute and energy are the two axes for AI data centres, he adds. “So the key competitive question has moved from how much compute can I get, to how much compute can be deployed, powered and cooled economically.
“And this question is becoming a national infrastructure issue.”
Five strategic shifts are reshaping AI infrastructure, Gnanajothi adds:
- Power is evolving from infrastructure to becoming a strategic business enabler;
- Cooling is evolving from a facility function to a compute-centric design;
- Infrastructure delivery is becoming industrialised and platform based;
- Operations are becoming intelligent, predictive and software-defined; and
- An integrated infrastructure ecosystem is replacing standalone products.
Vertiv stands ready to support the growth and changes in data centre infrastructure, says Paul Ryan, president: Midde East and Africa at Vertiv.
The company provides power, cooling, infrastructure delivery, operations and the ecosystem.
“The world depends on the data that we power and cool,” says Ryan.