F E A T U R E viable power option that ’ s not necessarily connected to the grid . These are all encouraging but , at this stage , are still exploratory and in their infancy .
We ’ ll also need to see modifications in the regulatory framework that maintain safety and reliability but also serve as catalysts for innovation and speed-to-market , all of which ultimately benefit household consumers and data centres , among other energy-intensive , high-tech industries .
Adriaan Oosthoek , Chairman , Portus Data Centers Group
As we are nearing the end of the year , there is a natural tendency to reflect and look forward . As I am inclined to plan ahead , I ’ ll focus on the latter . So , what do we expect to see in 2025 in our industry ?
Well , unsurprisingly , I think we ’ ll see a continuation of the current trends . From a volume perspective , the market will continue to be dominated by demand from the large hyperscalers and they will continue to deploy large public cloud instances and AI infrastructures driving continued significant growth .
High density ( AI ) will drive increased demand for liquid cooling , offering great opportunities for new entrants as legacy data centres were not designed for this . ‘ AI native ’ data centres will become the norm .
The big data centre operators will double down on locations . We will see more 250MW + data centre campus announcements .
However , as ‘ applied ’ AI becomes more common , demand for smaller compute and ( inference ) AI deployments closer to the eyeballs and closer to the point of origination of the data will increase steeply as well . The large data centre players will be unable to address this and new entrants with regional focus will step up .
Networks have always been the foundation for this – every IT infrastructure generates proportional data transfer requirements so the bigger the data centres the bigger the demand on the networks .
We will see more focus on network redundancy , sabotage of vulnerable subsea cables is only an example of the increase in risk . Connectivity-dense data centres always played a hub function and will increase in importance even more as they offer redundancy that is otherwise difficult to achieve .
Last but not least , as we are already seeing , funding for all this new infrastructure will increasingly come from private equity and some new conglomerates are in the making .
The backdrop for all this is an increasingly unstable world , however , the trends described above are so fundamental that only the most catastrophic scenarios will dampen these developments – all other scenarios will see an exhilarating 2025 for the data centre industry .
www . intelligentdatacentres . com 39