Gen AI Developments Captivate Data Center World Audience
Cybersecurity and power concerns still linger, but support for generative artificial intelligence is the major change for data center pros in 2024.
![Data Center World sign Data Center World sign](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt36a5fe9a282df1a5/6620434d744afa279a04d662/Data_Center_World_2024_Sign.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Kleyman welcomed Data Center World attendees by providing industry trends and innovations. He said these are boom times for data centers, both in the areas of builds and technology innovation.
“There's no slowdown in this entire industry,” he said. “We are continuing to build more infrastructure to support not just your Citrix servers, your VMware, your Exchange, your SQL, but now your ability to ask data a question and get a conscious answer back to generate wholly original content, based on the information and data that we have gathered. This is an extraordinarily technological leap.”
Of course, the ability to talk to our data comes from gen AI, or “the 500-pound generated GPT gorilla in the room” according to Kleyman.
“Listen, if you're sick of it, I don't know what to tell you,” he said. “This isn't a fad. This is not a technology shift. It's a shift in humanity. The way we interact with data has fundamentally changed everything.”
Kleyman presented results of the 2024 State of the Data Center report, which showed that 56% of respondents said they plan to deploy AI-capable solutions for their facilities.
“The data center is going to be supporting their users’ and their customers’ AI solutions,” Kleyman said. “They’re not doing it for fun. They’re doing it because their customers are demanding it.”
As a result, organizations are migrating data back from clouds to on-premises or colocation sites, and 71% say they have seen an increase in power load. Nearly one-quarter (22%) said the power increase is significant. And 38% said their cooling environments fail to meet their requirements.
That has brought in increase in interest in liquid cooling – not a new technology – and renewable energy, which is relatively new. Solar, wind and even nuclear energy are gaining traction. Kleyman said Equinix recently invested $25 million to purchase nuclear energy.
According to Omdia's research, there will be 5 million predictive AI servers and 1 million gen AI servers installed by the end of the year.
So if AI has already been here for awhile, "the question people are asking is, ‘Why should I care now? What’s changing?’” asked Vlad Galabov, Omdia’s research director for cloud and data center. “What’s the tipping point?”
Galabov said there are three factors that have created such a stir around AI.
“The first one is, the proof is in the pudding. You have to prove that there is demand,” he said. “So if you have to create a generative application, then there is demand for people to buy.” ChatGPT proved that.
Another factor is fear of missing out is driving the large companies to invest in AI. Large companies have missed big waves before, such as Microsoft with smartphones and Google with social media.
“Now they're thinking, ‘How can I not miss out on the next one?’” Galabov said. “That is why we're seeing such rapid investment.
“And then finally, the technology is there," he added. "From a processing perspective, in terms of how we can compute an AI algorithm, we have gotten much better over the years. And this means both at a singular processing level, but also how servers are interconnected.”
AI may have replaced cybersecurity as the No. 1 IT topic, but security threats are still rampant. It’s no surprise that ransomware headed the list of security concerns in the 2024 State of the Data Center report for the seventh straight year. But outside human threats placed among the top five for the first time, as 39% of respondents said they consider it a threat.
“Physical threats,” Kleyman said. “We are a target, we are being zeroed in on. And not just cybersecurity, but physical security as well. These malicious actors are not shy about it, either. There are more eyes on us. There’s more focus on us. We are critical infrastructure.”
Who says data center management can’t be innovative? This audience volunteer demonstrated how DC Vision AR software from DC Smarter enables remote facilities management. He is conducting a virtual data center walkthrough with augmented reality glasses that show him an overlay of a data center. The AR technology uses a heat mapping feature to let engineers visualize and monitor server rack temperatures in real-time. It also uses AI to improve maintenance and troubleshooting.
“This is the future,” Kleyman said. “They’re going to be sitting in their pajamas, calling up the office and designing their facilities.”
Who says data center management can’t be innovative? This audience volunteer demonstrated how DC Vision AR software from DC Smarter enables remote facilities management. He is conducting a virtual data center walkthrough with augmented reality glasses that show him an overlay of a data center. The AR technology uses a heat mapping feature to let engineers visualize and monitor server rack temperatures in real-time. It also uses AI to improve maintenance and troubleshooting.
“This is the future,” Kleyman said. “They’re going to be sitting in their pajamas, calling up the office and designing their facilities.”
DATA CENTER WORLD — If you’ve been paying attention to IT over the past year, you won’t be surprised to hear generative artificial intelligence (AI) dominated talk at Data Center World 2024. Gen AI worked its way into almost every keynote and session, as experts helped prepare practitioners to tailor their data centers for the new technology. (Data Center World is run by Informa Tech, Channel Futures' parent company.)
While data center topics such as cybersecurity and power constraints weren’t ignored, speakers consistently stressed gen AI is much more than a passing fad.
![Omdia's Roy Illsley Omdia's Roy Illsley](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltc783a373e9411298/6537c20d9b0902f103d263ad/Illsley-Roy_Omdia.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Omdia's Roy Illsley
“AI is a massive transformation,” Roy Illsey, Omdia’s chief analyst for IT operations, said during the Omdia Analyst Summit held in conjunction with Data Center World. (Omdia also is owned by Channel Futures parent company, Informa.) “ChatGPT has opened up AI to be commercialized. It will change everything we know about work and society, because it will go everywhere. And the data center has be be ready to accommodate it. People don’t want to be left behind.”
Bill Kleyman, CEO of Apolo and Data Center World program chair, also stressed the importance of gen AI during his keynote presentations.
“It’s not just ChatGPT,” Kleyman said. “It’s these new neural networks, it’s these new architectures around AI, it’s completely new things that we’re putting into our racks. We are really entering a new era of distributed computing, edge compute and critical infrastructure to support more data workloads.”
See the slideshow above for highlights from this week's conference in Washington, D.C.
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