AI has a weight problem

The long lifespan of data centers, typically expected to be a couple of decades, means that facility infrastructure relies on inherently speculative predictions of the power and cooling requirements of future IT hardware. By the start of the 2020s, the surge in server design power led to increased uncertainty around the electrical and mechanical requirements of IT over the next five to 10 years.

These electrical and mechanical requirements are even less clear today: the sudden popularity of generative AI, together with the high-performance infrastructure it relies on, has completely confounded the data center industry’s expectations about its own future. This is largely due to the prevailing belief that generative AI workloads need hardware with exorbitant power and cooling requirements.