Recent Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2024 indicated many interesting findings. My comments included in the list (with fact based commercial twist at this time).
1) Average PUE (1,56) value has not improved over 5 years. Must notice, that PUE definition already now, and especially in the future needs renewal because of several reasons, e.g., liquid cooling and heat reuse. Telia Helsinki Data Center PUE was 1,17 in July 2024. That was due the MW size heat reuse in production. Local energy company Helen needs heat also at summertime, which naturally has been time for higher PUE values because of warm summer days - yes, there is sometimes warm also in Nordic:)
2) Over half of the Data Center operators are sleeping with tracking their sustainability metrics. Let´s see, if EED will bring the change in EU. This first reporting round of energy efficiency metrics to EU is definitely more or less a rehearsal, but in the future there might be also sanctions for poor performers. Telia HDC tracks sustainability KPIs widely already.
3) DC outages remained at the same level. Operators are countering increases with complexity, density and extreme weather. Telia HDC has not faced any outages since the start in June 2018. Behind of that is well designed and built redundancy and great electricity grid in Finland and of course skilled operations staff.
4) The densest workloads in DCs are not AI workloads, but business applications and HPC. That makes sense, because possibility to host true and dense AI workloads does not fit to all of the data centers mainly because of cooling limitations (technical difficulties or high investment level). The amount of liquid cooled workloads in DCs is yet rather small against overall computing, but increasing rapidly, though. Current AI customer requirements are typically many MWs already in the first phase and growth options indicated as well.
Telia HDC welcomes also new AI workloads indulging green, stable and secure production environment.
#datacenter #trends #AI #sustainability
