AI, Sustainability at Forefront as the Industry Turns Attention to 2024
Intense, urgent
demand for artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities – and the dueling pressure
to reduce energy consumption, costs and greenhouse gas emissions – loom large
over the data center industry heading into 2024. The proliferation
of AI (as Vertiv predicted two years ago)
along with the infrastructure and sustainability challenges inherent in
AI-capable computing can be felt across the industry and throughout the 2024
data center trends forecast from Vertiv, a global provider of critical digital
infrastructure and continuity solutions.
“AI and its downstream impact on data center densities and power demands
have become the dominant storylines in our industry,” said Vertiv CEO Giordano
(Gio) Albertazzi. “Finding ways to help customers both support the demand for
AI and reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions is a significant
challenge requiring new collaborations between data centers, chip and server
manufacturers, and infrastructure providers.”
These are the
trends Vertiv’s experts expect to dominate the data center ecosystem in 2024:
1. AI sets the terms
for new builds and retrofits: Surging demand for artificial
intelligence across applications is pressuring organizations to make
significant changes to their operations. Legacy facilities are ill-equipped to
support widespread implementation of the high-density computing required for
AI, with many lacking the required infrastructure for liquid cooling. In the
coming year, more and more organizations are going to realize half-measures are
insufficient and opt instead for new construction –
increasingly featuring prefabricated modular solutions that shorten deployment
timelines – or large-scale retrofits that fundamentally alter their power and
cooling infrastructure. Such significant changes present opportunities to
implement more eco-friendly technologies and practices, including liquid
cooling for AI servers, applied in concert with air cooled thermal management
to support the entire data center space.
2. Expanding the
search for energy storage alternatives: New energy storage technologies
and approaches have shown the ability to intelligently integrate with the grid
and deliver on a pressing objective – reducing generator starts. Battery energy
storage systems (BESS) support extended runtime demands by shifting the load as
necessary and for longer durations and can integrate seamlessly with
alternative energy sources, such as solar or fuel cells. This minimizes
generator use and reduces their environmental impact. BESS installations will
be more common in 2024, eventually evolving to fit “bring your own power”
(BYOP) models and delivering the capacity, reliability and cost-effectiveness
needed to support AI-driven demand.
3. Enterprises
prioritize flexibility: While cloud
and colocation providers aggressively pursue new deployments to meet demand,
organizations with enterprise data centers are likely to diversify investments
and deployment strategies. AI is a factor here as organizations wrestle with
how best to enable and apply the technology while still meeting sustainability
objectives. Businesses may start to look to on-premise capacity to support
proprietary AI, and edge application deployments may be impacted by AI
tailwinds. Many organizations can be expected to prioritize incremental
investment – leaning heavily on prefabricated modular solutions – and service
and maintenance to extend the life of legacy equipment. Such services can
provide ancillary benefits, optimizing operation to free up capacity in
maxed-out computing environments and increasing energy efficiency in the
process. Likewise, organizations can reduce Scope 3 carbon emissions by
extending the life of existing servers rather than replacing and scrapping
them.
4. The race to the
cloud faces security hurdles: Gartner projects global
spending on public cloud services to increase by 20.4% in 2024, and the
mass migration to the cloud shows no signs of abating. This puts pressure
on cloud providers to increase capacity quickly to support demand for AI and
high performance computing, and they will continue to turn to colocation partners
around the world to enable that expansion. For cloud customers moving more and
more data offsite, security is paramount, and according to Gartner, 80% of CIOs plan to
increase spending on cyber/information security in 2024. Disparate national and
regional data security regulations may create complex security challenges as
efforts to standardize continue.
Leave A Comment