AI Data Center

Widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has been ‘just around the corner’ for decades. (Researchers have been working on neural networks since the early 1970s.) Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997 but it wasn’t until 14 years later that Watson won Jeopardy. Another decade later, and AI is driving cars, writing code, and making medical diagnoses.

AI is part of a long history of digital innovation, but it represents a sea change from the technology developments that came before. It has massively accelerated technological innovation—in large part because generative AI tools like ChatGPT are now accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

AI has gone mainstream, and the impact is reverberating everywhere—from the halls of Congress to corporate boardrooms. In a Deloitte study of corporate executives conducted at the end of 2020, nearly 80% of executives surveyed said they had implemented some form of AI-driven automation. Another 16% said they planned to do so within three years.

AI impacts the data center, too, of course. “AI requirements, along with continued adoption of cloud services, are the main drivers of hyperscale expansion, driving record growth in the data center sector,” according to JLL. AI is expected to accelerate data center demand even more as cloud providers increasingly offer GPU-as-a-service offerings, AI companies offer new AI services, and enterprises race to adopt the technology.

An AI data center has massively higher data center power requirements. As infrastructure leaders look to pack more power into the same space, average data center densities are rising dramatically. Direct liquid cooling will be essential.

At Stream Data Centers, we’ve been watching these AI data center trends develop and have worked hard to prepare ourselves to respond.

We walked in lockstep with clients preparing to support massive AI environments—in order to ensure that our standard product meets their evolving AI-driven requirements. For example, seeing the rise of applications leveraging AI and knowing it would dramatically raise densities, we foresaw the need for new cooling approaches. Yet there was no off-the-shelf solution that would accommodate today’s air cooled densities and tomorrow’s direct liquid cooled requirements without extensive rework and additional expense. So we developed a proprietary design and equipment that can easily support direct air or direct liquid cooling.

Our configurable data center design and innovative proprietary data center cooling design gives us the flexibility to support our customers’ performance specs as they evolve. For the foreseeable future, at least, some customers will have ‘traditional’ average densities (10-12 kW per rack) mixed in with high density AI data center deployments. Our design supports both, mitigating environmental impact and reducing cost and complexity for tenants as they evolve their technology infrastructure.

Explore more in our whitepaper Data Center Development in an AI-Driven Market.