The critical digital infrastructure sector continues to enjoy robust growth. Rapidly evolving technologies will further drive and sustain this trend in 2024 and beyond — but will also create new challenges for operators. This report highlights some of these challenges and their implications. These include greater scrutiny over sustainability commitments; the adoption of power-hungry AI; the need for (and limitations of) direct liquid cooling; the evolution of data center management software; and the emergence of data center campuses that redefine the meaning of hyperscale.

Introduction

At the beginning of each calendar year, Uptime Intelligence compiles a short list of trends or predictions that will be relevant to the digital infrastructure sector for the year (and years) ahead. These lists aim to highlight crucial, yet often overlooked industry topics, which encourage a closer examination. Our five predictions for 2023 have proved to be largely accurate and will remain relevant for 2024. These are summarized in Table 1.