Expect Datacenters To Get Denser, Hotter, And Smarter
The Next Platform, Monday, January 22nd, 2024
The datacenter industry today looks very different than it did a decade ago. A number of factors have emerged over the past few years: most recently, the proliferation of large-scale AI, but also the slowing of Moore's law, and the nagging issue of sustainability.
Uptime Institute expects a confluence of these challenges to begin driving material change across the industry in 2024, as operators grapple with cascading pressures related to power, cooling, management, densification, and regulation.
While not the first on Uptime's list, with the issue of artificial intelligence on everyone's mind, we'll start there. The past twelve months have seen the deployment of massive GPU clusters by the major cloud providers and hyperscalers. Uptime posits that Nvidia shipped somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000 H100s in 2023 alone. (We think it was closer to 710,000.) By the end of 2024, the chipmaker is expected to ship between 1.5 million and 2 million more of these chips.