Latest Data Centre Opinions

Techerati speaks with Giancarlo Giacomello at Aruba Enterprise about the latest data centre management trends and what the market looks like in today’s post-pandemic world. Data centres are complex infrastructures – what are the top priorities when it comes to efficiently managing them?  Now, industry operators must consider factors such as ensuring sustainability regulations are… Read More

Intel has introduced a four-year strategy to iterate on infrastructure processing unit (IPU) and AI chips, in an effort to recover some ground lost to data centre competitors Nvidia and AMD.   Nvidia’s data centre business is worth more than $10 billion USD per year, more than three times the value of its business in… Read More

According to members of the EU initiative and related sources, U.S. technology companies are lobbying the EU to make upcoming regulations more tech-friendly. Just this week, technology companies reportedly attempted to utilize the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact as leverage to influence the decisions of EU lawmakers. The Pact is a voluntary association of data… Read More

In a recent announcement by the Japanese Prime Minister, Fumido Kishida stated that the government expects 5G coverage to reach 99% of the country’s population by 2030. That’s an increase from less than 40% coverage as of 2020. 5G networks are expanding across the globe, and data centres must be prepared to meet the new… Read More

Governments and regulators are becoming increasingly concerned with the resilience of digital  systems, particularly in critical sectors including financial services, telecom, transportation and cloud services. However, while some of these industries – for example, financial services – are highly regulated and subject to government oversight others – like cloud services – are not.

Investment in smart cities is growing worldwide. According to information from Statista, “Technology spending on smart city initiatives worldwide is forecast to more than double between 2018 and 2023, increasing from 81 billion U.S. dollars in 2018 to 189.5 billion in 2023.”

Site selection decisions that are currently in the proof-of-concept phase include underwater, like the Microsoft undersea data centre off the coast of Scotland; and underground, like the repurposed mine in Norway and the Oracle data centre in Israel.

“That all adds up to huge and growing quarterly investments in data centres. The big five US hyperscalers still lead in terms of quarterly data centre spending, but the Chinese hyperscalers are growing rapidly.”

Transporting heat requires insulated plumbing and ducts, which are quite expensive. Adding piping to share heat from a data centre to a location only 400 metres away could add a million dollars to data centre construction costs.

This is distressing in the basic fact that it seems that women’s opportunities are limited in a growing, lucrative field of employment. It is an even larger problem when viewed through the lens of a critical labor shortage. With a more inclusive employment base, the pool of available talent would be that much larger, and help bridge the current labor shortage with skilled, talented workers.

Economic uncertainty, chiefly, the worrying headwinds around inflation and supply chain issues, not to mention a lack of clarity about how we will economically exit COVID increase the need for clarity around a number of key questions for data centre operators and their customers.

SSE has launched its IDNO Optimal Power Networks and is now aiming to gain a market presence. Having got its electricity distribution licence from Ofgem in April 2020, this allows the company to own and operate electricity distribution assets up to 132 kV anywhere in Britain.