Chris Sharp, the chief technology officer of Digital Core REIT’s sponsor, Digital Realty, says the data centre industry may have to find another source of power to match the growing need for power for data centres.
This could be nuclear, with data centres possibly coming with their own built-in nuclear reactors, says Sharp in an interview with the BBC in February.
The interview came after Digital Realty just built a new data centre in Portland, Oregon, that’s dedicated to AI.
"A normal data centre needs 32 megawatts of power flowing into the building. For an AI data centre it's 80 megawatts," says Sharp to the BBC.
Sharp has been known to be prescient when it comes to tech trends.
When The Edge Singapore spoke to John Stewart, the CEO of Digital Core REIT’s manager, Stewart referred to Sharp’s presentation at Digital Realty’s investor day in 2017, where he pointed to artificial intelligence (AI) as being the future.
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“He was way out front of this,” said Stewart.
In a June 2023 blog post, the first of three posts about AI, Sharp said that AI has also been at the forefront of the company’s agenda for several years now.
“We’ve seen how the advent of cloud technology significantly transformed the landscape of digital business, and AI is set to disrupt industries in ways we are only beginning to understand. The key, as always, is to be on the right side of disruption, by embracing change and leveraging it to your advantage,” Sharp wrote.
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In his second post about AI, he noted that the needs of information technology (IT) infrastructure are always evolving.
“AI isn’t the first new technology to impact IT infrastructure requirements, and it won’t be the last,” he said.
On AI’s unique needs, he added: “AI requires more computing, network, and storage infrastructure than any shift on the internet since the cloud, and in many cases, we believe it will be even more intense.”
During his interview with The Edge Singapore, Stewart revealed that data centres will need more power for technologies such as generative AI.
“That’s part of what’s driving data centre demand… in addition to everything [that] we’re already doing,” he says.
“AI’s generally powered by NVIDIA’s graphics processing units (GPUs). They’re much more powerful, power-dense [and] require a lot more power to run. Then that, obviously, has implications for data centre design,” he adds. “Because they consume so much power, they run a lot hotter. [They’re] so hot that you can’t cool them with air, you have to cool them with liquid. So that’s different from some data centre designs.”
He adds that some of these new AI applications, including large language models (LLMs) will require a lot of processing power.
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On whether Digital Core REIT will require conducting asset enhancement initiatives (AEIs) for its data centres to enable new features for new technologies, Stewart says the process will be “incremental” and that any changes will be made in addition to what its data centres already have currently.
“I’d say Digital Core REIT’s existing assets are running AI applications with them today. The most prevalent AI names that you can imagine have applications running AI applications on our data centre. So they’re certainly capable,” he says.
“That said, what we’re running in our DCs are what I’d call hot spots… it’s not a large massive GPU LLM model farm. I would say we can accommodate AI applications within our existing portfolio but there’s a whole new opportunity set. Again, we can accommodate liquid cooling, but these new GPU farms – there’s generally going to be new construction [and] brand new design in addition to everything. But AI isn’t going to replace everything we do today, it’s going to be on top of it.”
