Data Center Providers: Land And Power Shortages Hampering The AI Era
CRN, Monday, July 8th, 2024
Data center providers told CRN that electricity and available real estate were in high demand before generative AI. And now the size and power requirements of the GPU's stack are pushing demand to a 'fever pitch,' said Wes Cummins, CEO of Dallas-based Applied Digital, an Nvidia Elite partner.
'I've been out preaching this for well over a year now, that data center capacity is going to be an issue in this industry,' said Cummins, whose organization has deployed 6,100 of Nvidia's H100 GPUs across three of its data centers and has 1.3 Gigawatts of space under development. 'It's a huge issue. If you are trying to deploy a lot of GPUs right now-and we do that in our cloud business -like trying to go out and find any capacity for this, of any meaningful size right now, it's impossible. It doesn't exist.'
Lisa Miller, senior vice president of Platform Alliances and Global Channel at Redwood City, Calif.-based Equinix, told CRN that at the moment supply and demand are 'a little out of whack.'