Gen AI Developments Captivate Data Center World Audience

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

“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.”

Related:Intel, AMD Talk Up Biggest AI Challenges, Benefits at Data Center World

See the slideshow above for highlights from this week's conference in Washington, D.C.