Australia’s DCs stand at pivotal point
Australia’s data centre industry stands at a pivotal point, confronting a pressing shortage of skilled workers and a notable gender disparity. Speaking at W.Media’s recent Melbourne Cloud and Datacenter Convention Uptime Institute VP Sales Rana Qadir shed light on the magnitude of these challenges, underlining the urgency for concerted action to safeguard the industry’s growth and resilience.
Qadir emphasised the coming tsunami – with its inevitable implications – highlighting just how precarious Australia could find its position, both in terms of resourcing and the energy implications, if prompt action is not done now.
According to Supply Chain Insiders, Nvidia sold around 550,000 H100 chips last year, and they’re anticipating to sell around 1.5 to 2 million H100 chips just alone in 2024,” Qadir revealed. “These chips put together, along with the ancillary equipment that is required to support [them], will require an additional or new 60–80,000 racks. In reality, we anticipate that the number will be far higher than this, because most of the legacy infrastructure is not developed to support the kind of per rack kW required.
He said if 60,000 racks used an estimated average power of around 50 kilowatts: “we should be looking at around three gigawatts of additional capacity by the start of 2025.” Highlighting the energy consumption associated with AI driven technologies, Qadir then drew attention to the significant impact of platforms like ChatGPT, which has more than 180 million subscribers. Assuming a computational complexity of 560 Giga flops per token with ChatGPT4 and an average of 512 tokens per query, this would result in 280 trillion floating point operations for a single query.
As a result ChatGPT generates approximately five billion queries per month. This results in a significant energy consumption of 2500 megawatt hours, equivalent to 3.5 megawatts of continuous IT load, he said.
Missing the human factor
AI aside, even amid the promising growth outlook for cloud computing, Qadir sounded a cautionary note regarding the looming workforce shortfall in Australia. He said experts are projecting a cumulative aggregate growth rate of at least 33.7% over the next five years. However, this growth trajectory is not without its challenges, particularly in terms of workforce capacity and expertise, he added. The DC industry will ramp up in Australia – at least a 30% increase in build up capacity and overall capacity could potentially double in the next four to five years.
Qadir highlighted the specific challenges associated with scaling the cloud infrastructure and the implications for workforce development: “As cloud adoption continues to surge, organisations are faced with a growing demand for specialised skills in areas such as cloud architecture, security, and optimisation. Ensuring an adequate supply of skilled professionals to meet these demands is paramount to sustaining growth and innovation in the industry.”
“Accenture conducted a study for the New South Wales skills board, which was published in 2022,” he said. “So the demand for the ICT workers is expected to grow at a stable rate of 3.8% per annum and it will reach around 1.2 million workers nationally by 2030. That’s just for Australia. Based on the forecast supply, there is expected to be a shortfall of 186,000 workers by 2030 and 85,000 in New South Wales alone.”
Looking more deeply, he said that at the start of 2021, Australia had around 342,000 in the overall ICT sector but 30% of this workforce is going to retire and leave the industry by 2030. “We’re expecting that we’ll get around 52,000 new graduates. We’ll probably re–skill 86,000 people from adjacent industries. We’ll be heavily relying on skilled migration as well. And all of this put together with bring up to 392,000 people but there is still going to be a shortfall,” he warned.
Big implications for the sector
Qadir spelt out the implications of the resource shortage for operators: a surge in operational burdens, a lapse in knowledge sharing and a propensity for shortcuts. This dearth will engender training deficits, staff exhaustion, and escalating attrition rates, thereby heightening operational risks and business vulnerabilities.
From a commercial standpoint, this translates into project delays, extended time-to-market periods, and missed opportunities. Moreover, the escalating demand for skilled resources will exacerbate existing challenges, impeding talent acquisition efforts and inflating construction and operational costs. Such repercussions threaten to undercut the pivotal role of new technology in driving economic growth and global competitiveness. Failure to address these staffing exigencies will lead to an economic downturn for Australia as a whole, he said.
Where are the women?
Qadir warned the data centre industry needs to stop being a “boys club”. “We need more women in the industry,” he said. “The weighted average within our industry is less than 8%, which is which is actually less than manufacturing, military and mining. 60% of the respondents to Uptime’s survey actually said that they have less than 5% representation, either whether it’s in design, construction or operations, so we really need to diversify our resource pool.”
Changing the landscape for the better
Qadir underscored the importance of collaboration and support from both the public and private sectors to overcome this looming crisis in the sector. “Collaboration is key to overcoming workforce challenges and fostering a culture of innovation and inclusion within the industry,” he said. “By partnering with government agencies, educational institutions and industry stakeholders, we can leverage collective expertise and resources to develop tailored solutions that address the unique needs of the data centre workforce.”
If Australia is going to reshape trajectory of Australia’s data centre industry Qadir said everyone in the industry must create more awareness about the sector in the general public. This means foster public understanding of the industry’s opportunities and engage with educational institutions to promote data centre careers – initiatives like the New South Wales Data Centre Academy, which is being built in collaboration with Microsoft. It also means partnering with existing initiatives and organisations to bolster workforce development efforts.
He added the industry needs to open up to resources from other industries. “We need to overcome our biases and focus on competency and matrixes and transferable skills and train people to fill domain specific gaps,” he said. He pointed out an electrical engineer knows how to calculate power, he knows how to do short circuit calculations but with training they can learn architecture and data centre redundancy.
Finally, he said the industry needs to establish a culture of lifelong learning and development, leveraging tools like Competency & Confidence Assessment Modelling (CCAM) to ensure ongoing skill enhancement. “The tool gives us visibility in terms of what each employee understand; what they do not understand and what they misunderstand as well,” he said. “And it also gauges their confidence level as well. So it’s not simply a matter of yes or no. It also evaluates and looks at your confidence level as to how confident you are in performing the task.”