2025年数据中心趋势

Expect theunexpected Foreword A wave of change caused by the surge in deployment of regenerative AI is upon us, with arace to build massive new facilities for training AI in the face of labour shortages, limited Adaptability and flexibility are the watchwords for 2025. The speed of technologicaldevelopment is already outpacing that of construction, which means that we will continue There are still a lot of question marks over exactly how the world is going to take hold of AIand use it day to day. And that will have a big impact on what we ask of our data centres By Scott SmythFounder and Group CEO The race is on to find new locations, new sources of power and sympathetic regulatoryregimes for those regions and governments looking to fulfil their digital growth ambitions. January, 2025 Read on for ourtop ten predictions for 2025, in Soben’s third annual trends report. Data CentreTrends 2025 Click on the rightto explore each trend. 1|AI: pause for thought Big is getting bigger Scaling up:hyperscale and beyond Impact of AI inference still unpredictable The increased processing power required by AI data centres means campuseswhich were considered large 10 years ago would today be thought of as aminnow. A hyperscale data centre was initially 20MW or more; five years ago,that had risen to perhaps 60 MW. Today, we are seeing plans for 1 GW Robotics ups the ante The burgeoning use of generative AI has seen a wave of planneddata centre projects which is stronger than anyone predicted.Looking forward, demand for AI data centres could rise at a rate of For now, these projects are largely focused on providing capacity for machinelearning, training up the algorithms that will be used to deliver AI tools and Expanding horizons:inference and emerging technologies Perhaps three years from now, we can expect the next wave of AI-drivendemand to hit. There will be an increased demand for data centre space closeto urban and industrial centres, smaller scale inference facilities that need low Almost every organisation could benefit from the deployment of AI, and manymore will over the next five years. The EU wants to see 75% of firms using AIby 2030. And its deployment could offer huge efficiencies in the public sector, With generative AI set to become business as usual for private and publicsector organisations, and embedded in almost every app we use via our The use of AI in healthcare, finance, and defence - already advanced comparedto other sectors - will ramp up. Applications range from medical diagnoses, drugdevelopment and AI-assisted robotic surgery in healthcare to loan appraisals, And then there is the vision of robots as part of the everyday. The news that Nvidia has set its sights on robotics, promising to showcasetechnology for humanoid robots in the first half of 2025, accelerates the arrivalof that vision. Tesla too is pushing that narrative – the realisation of its Also on the horizon is quantum computing which, while promising huge leapsin processing speed and capacity, will require significant changes to data The ambition for quantum computing to move from lab to data centre becamea little more attainable in December last year [2024] when Google unveiled its With the AI environment -and the infrastructure thatsupports it - changing sorapidly, agility and 2 | More on-site power generation Power constraints are delaying projects Plans for novel on-site power generation US turns to natural gas plants Power remains the constraining factor in many markets. In somelocations, there is not enough power available to feed future “One of my clients had a big campus scheduled to kick off in the next year orso. They recently said that they were taking it off the radar for at least a year Exploringsolutions to power challenges Low carbon power generation technologies, such as nuclear (see below) orhydrogen, are longer-term options. Digital Reef is planning a 600MW campus in As well as delaying start dates, developers have been looking at temporarymeasures for powering data centres while they wait for the necessary electrical In the shorter term, fossil fuels may be coming to the rescue. Some data centreoperators are turning to natural gas as a source of on-site power generation “On one project, we were considering sourcing power skids that we can poweroff local 13,000-volt power and transform up to 25,000 volts that we could use This could be seen as a bridging solution while lower carbon solutions areunder development[4]. Or it could reflect how operators expect the change in Power constraints are exacerbated by the increased power demand from AIdata centres, which could ramp up to ten times that of a standard rack. Aside Power is going to continue to bean issue. Elon Musk predictedwe would run out in a year ortwo. It has already happened in Microgrids offer an effective way to tap into local renewable energy sources andto provide energy security. Localised power systems that oper