Asked during the Data Center World opening keynote what will look different in the industry one year from now, Phill Lawson-Shanks, Chief Innovation Officer at Aligned Data Centers, predicted that growing AI inferencing workloads will demand much more edge processing.

“I think we'll see more inferencing at the edge. I think that's going to be the big push,” said Lawson-Shanks. “However that comes to be, whether it's refitting existing, legacy style buildings if that's possible for them, or containerized infrastructure closely adjacent. I also think we'll have more composable — I'm using that term from the software world — composable data centers … [with] the ability to have the building flex based on its workload.”

Amber Caramella, Chief Revenue Officer for Netrality Data Centers, also joined the April 21 keynote panel, “Data Centers in the AI Economy: The C-Suite Conversation.” Caramella predicted today’s uncertainty around AI workload volumes for training and inference will give way to much more clarity in the coming year.

“My crystal ball is that there's going to be even more adoption of AI. I think we are all going to have our own agents, and we're going to delegate real workforce function to them,” Caramella said. “... I think there's going to be more clarity around where the demand is, the true demands. Because there’s a lot of noise in the industry right now, and I think there will be more clarity around the different workloads.”

Here are four other insights from these innovative C-level leaders in the data center industry:

The traditional enterprise data center operator “hasn’t been well served” of late: Enterprise data centers keep the day-to-day economy running, moving the data that banks, hospitals, grocery stores, telcos, power companies, and most every business needs to operate. Lawson-Shanks expects a wave of investment and innovation from enterprise data centers. “I think the enterprise market as a client segment hasn't been very well served in the last few years because they haven't been able to transact quickly enough, and any available space has been gobbled up — it's a race to contract with the hyperscalers,” he said. “So, they're well overdue for a tech refresh. I think that's where this next big wave is going to come, more of the enterprise space at the edge, a resurgence at the edge.”

Speed to delivery has become the key hyperscaler data center priority: Hyperscalers who once might be content to secure data center capacity a couple of years out are now prioritizing capacity that can be deployed immediately. “They're still asking for more power, higher density solutions, liquid cooling or liquid cooling ready. But the main difference I'm seeing is timing,” Caramella said. “It's time to bring it online. People used to worry about just securing the capacity, and it can be built one, two, three years out. And now it needs to be real time or within a very near period. … You still need to be considerate of all the design expectations, but again, speed to delivery is key right now.”

Data centers can help stabilize the electrical grid: In Portland, Oregon, Aligned Data Centers bought a battery energy storage system (BESS) and provided it to the public grid for the utility to operate. Aligned needs that storage capacity for an estimated two to three hours a day for about two weeks in the summer, and now it offers stabilizing capacity for the grid. The company is also exploring utilities adding and operating nuclear small modular reactors (SMRs) on the grid through a power purchasing agreement. All these efforts help a region’s grid deal with rising power demands not just from data centers but also the broader needs as the economy electrifies more workloads across many industrial and consumer uses. “We need to be more active in the community in terms of being a stabilizing force for the utility,” Lawson-Shanks said. “… The loads on electrical utilities are astronomical, and we can help fix that.”

Listening and addressing community concerns must be one of the first priorities for data center operators: Data center operators and developers need to make community engagement one of their top priorities, Caramella said, or it risks becoming a “massive gating factor.” Data center teams need to explain the community benefits and economic impacts, listen to and address local community concerns, and become involved in the communities where they locate. “There are a couple of you out there that are doing a great job in being champions, but we need more. And we need to do it at a grassroots level,” she said. “It has to be well before permits.”

Data Center World attendees can view the keynotes and other conference sessions in the DCW app: https://datacenterworld.com/digital-event-resources/