An Industry In Fundamental Transformation

The data centre industry is expected to triple between now and 2030. This exponential demand is fuelled by acceleration of AI, IOT, incremental data storage and a growing user base. Data centres struggle to match demand due to land shortages, water and electricity constraints, growing environmental legislative pressures and the AI disruption that is forcing them to rethink their cooling and data centre designs.

Addressing these challenges requires innovative thinking. We work with different industry players to help them rethink their market strategy to take best advantage of this market growth, whilst addressing the specific challenges of the industry’s transition to Net Zero.

The new requirement for AI and HPC (High Power Computing) applications is a market inflection point, presenting the data centre industry with new revenue and margin growth opportunities. But the jury is still out in terms of how strong the AI demand will effectively be, and which strategy to adopt to best leverage the AI opportunity.

We works with data centre clients to develop Go-to-Market strategies and plans to unlock new value.  For example, a mixed demand for traditional and AI/HPC capacity favours a tiered approach to offers and flexible business models, including packaged AI-ready servers and both air and liquid cooling.  We have also built a NovAzure Value Calculator to illustrate the additional value of liquid cooling over air cooling for AI/HPC.

Our Net Zero+ programmes profiled for data centres fully engage ‘hearts and minds’ to enable C-suites and their teams to understand the implications of climate change. It helps to prepare and drive profitable Net Zero with suppliers and customers, by applying a Journey Framework to decarbonise, implement circularity and unlock new markets.  This Certified Continuous Professional Development working sessions can be face-to-face or virtual.

Most data centres were designed for densities of around 5kW/rack.  New AI/HPC applications require densities of about 20kW/rack and 100kW/rack is coming.  Air-cooling simply can’t cool these densities.  What should Data Centre operators do to future-proof cooling of existing and greenfield data centres?

Even where land isn’t a constraint, liquid cooling provides major reductions in power and water consumption, greatly improves greenhouse gases performance and helps to meet the EU Energy Performance Directive. We work with server, cooling and fluids OEMs and understand the evolving DC/ cooling landscape.  NovAzure’s proprietary Value Calculator modelling compares the total cost of ownership of air and liquid cooling solutions for greenfield and retrofit data centres, illustrates carbon savings and the potential to unlock stranded Data Centre capacity.

Data centre operators need to know the best way to increase data centre capacity and perfromance. Some data centres have power supply or cooling constraints, where empty space remains as ‘stranded capacity’ in data halls.

We have been working with leading data centre industry players, including operators, to help them to unlock stranded data hall capacity and evaluate potential new business models and revenue streams, such as turn-key ‘DC or IT-as-a-service’ and customer solutions with improved decarbonisation and circularity benefits.