Welcome to Cloud Cover!

You’re reading the first edition of Cloud Cover from Datacloud – a monthly update bringing you first-hand research, insights from CXOs around the industry, analysis of trends and threats, and interesting bits and pieces from around the digital infra world.

Here’s what we’ve got for you this month:

What CXOs are thinking about, part 1

In what order of importance would you rank these challenges for data centre power?

1. Timely grid access
2. Fuel supply chains
3. Grid reliability
4. Cost of power
5. Carbon emissions

If you’d keep them in that order, you agree with the 30 industry leaders taking part in the Digital Infra Leaders Summit within Datacloud USA in February (hosted by Datacloud and the GLF - a techoraco brand ), where they were quizzed on their sentiment for the year ahead.

72% of respondents consider timely grid access to be the highest priority for their operations, dwarfing all the others in terms of importance – 28% are most worried about grid reliability and cost of power, and just 11% are mainly concerned about carbon emissions.  

There’s plenty more to delve into in the survey results. These include the main driver for digital infra growth in 2024-25 (clue: it rhymes with ‘say hi’), what M&A will focus on in that time period (infra consolidation), who will provide the capital for data centres in North America (financial investors and private capital), and 32 pages’ worth of other findings - see the executive summary here.

What CXOs are thinking about, part 2

The Datacloud team performed more or less the same exercise at the Datacloud Global Congress in Cannes in June, looking at the issues from a more global perspective. This resulted in the Digital Infra Leaders Europe Summit and a trove of primary data on market sentiment.

There were some interesting findings here, too: 100% of data centre CXOs surveyed at our Digital Infra Leaders Summit expected the relevance of power supply for data centres to increase in the next 12 months. 83% of participants stated that adapting to a green energy supply was a high or the top strategic priority, but fewer than 30% thought that there was sufficient access to green energy for their current business model.

Something that also jumped out was the variation between how important power is and how important fibre is - availability of power was a key challenge for 67% of respondents, but availability of fibre was a top priority for just 4%. There's plenty more to dive through here.

DC power in numbers

On that note, McKinsey recently released a report that put some figures on the power crunch in data centres and AI buildout in general. Some of the standout figures:

• >3x: How much European data centre power consumption is expected to increase by in the next decade
• 3-5 years: How long it can take to supply data centres with energy in established data centre markets
• 15-20%: The contribution of data centres to all net new power add in Europe through to 2030

The whole executive summary is worth a read.

Does nuclear count as green?

One by one, the world’s hyperscalers are turning to nuclear power (or trying to - Meta and Amazon both suffered regulatory setbacks this week) in order to square the circle of how to provide power that’s both steadily available and non-carbon-emitting. But is everyone on board? Nuclear power was one of the topics that came up at the Capacity Europe event in London, which alongside its general connectivity focus gives a lot of stage time to data centre issues.

There was a range of opinions on both the suitability of nuclear, the real value and potential of AI, the extent to which telcos are building out for it, and a lot more – here’s the summary.

What a Trump or Harris win will mean for digital infrastructure

Data centres and digital infra has become so vital for general economic performance that it's a political talking point in its own right. So any change of government usually means new policies - whether welcome or otherwise - for our industry. And given the US represents 75% of AI spend, for example, the upcoming elections there matter more than most.

Capacity Media's Ben Wodecki has waded through both candidates' declared policies, statements and attitudes to various aspects of digital regulation and policies so you don't have to. He summarises what to expect here.

10 questions that need answering

At the Datacloud USA event, we took questions from the audience using the Slido tool. This not only avoids having to run around with a microphone, it also means we can access the questions and post them on LinkedIn, which is exactly what we've done below.

Here are ten interesting ones – thoughts on any of them in the comments are very welcome.

1. Far edge locations are expensive due to the lack of economies of scale of a large site. How do the economics work when operators move to the edge?
2. Given the variability in AI forecasts for training and inference, how can operators manage that uncertainty within capacity planning?
3. What are the prospects of using natural gas to support scale micro-grids?
4. Do sustainability regulations help or hurt innovation and growth?
5. What are the conversations like with Indigenous communities and the use of their land to build data centers?
6. When will small scale 300 MW to 1 GW nuclear fusion reactors will be commercially available?
7. Will liquid cooling at data center sites significantly increase water demand, considering that water use is already a contentious issue in many communities?
8. What are some of the opportunities/challenges when working with government in new markets?
9. Is solar and long duration storage (36 hour or more) a solution for data center power?
10. Will AI and the growing need for compute close to users reinvigorate Adaptive Reuse to get to revenue faster?

A hot new metric for AI: lightbulbs

Cristiano Ronaldo doesn’t have much to complain about in his life. But a few years ago he was the unlucky influencer chosen as the scapegoat for the resource use of digital infrastructure, when it was found that one of his Instagram posts uses enough energy to power ten households.

For ChatGPT, the unit of measurement is now lightbulbs – to write a 100-word email, the Washington Post found that LLM uses the equivalent energy that would keep 14 of them lit for an hour, as well as using one bottle of water. The PR problems of data centres are nothing new, and we can now expect to see more mass-media comparisons for AI power use as well.

(Edit - not a bad prediction! As this newsletter hits your feed, the British newspaper The Guardian has published a lengthy analysis comparing all the different energy use comparisons that modern internet activity generates)

Bits and pieces

• A mesmerising video of the most popular Internet browsers over the last 30 years. Anyone remember Mosaic and Netscape?
• Steven Carlini from Schneider Electric has given his thoughts on short, medium and long-term solutions to meet data centre energy requirements – it’s worth a read
• Meta's nuclear-powered data centre plan scuppered by bees
• Russia has fined Google more than the GDP of the whole world
• A heartwarming post from Andy Davis about how data centres have enriched his life by allowing him to watch his daughters’ football matches remotely – featuring the best goal you’ll ever seen on LinkedIn…
• Four profiles of data centres that are interesting or unusual in some way:
• One built in an old military bunker
• One that needs to service three different institutional bodies with strict data security requirements
• One that uses the atmosphere for cooling effectively
• One that makes extensive use of robotic operations

Upcoming Datacloud events

You can next catch the Datacloud team in Singapore for Datacloud Asia in December, followed by the Datacloud Middle East gathering in February. After that it’s a big one – the inaugural Datacloud Energy & ESG Europe event, which is the only event uniting data centre operators, gridcos and energy innovators to tackle the industry’s power problems.