Nabeel Mahmood has used his extensive and varied experience across all life stages of the data center, technology and application stacks, and security to inform his insights on the data center industry sector. He is also a user of data centers, and he sits on the board of a telephony company, which is responsible for the voice and video experience used by Zoom and Microsoft Teams. His company acts as the back haul carrier for them across 182 countries. He has recently spoken in Seattle on the emotional intelligence derivatives of large language models to gauge how people react to an online experience. He describes himself more than anything as a ‘technologist’.
Nabeel’s path towards technology started accidentally as he moved to the United States for treatment following an injury. There, he “fell into a conversation with a few lads at Berkeley who were designing building security applications, and that’s where I fell in love with the culture of innovation”.
He started in the software and security business, which led to working for Emerson Network Power and, from there on, designing and building data centers. He has been responsible for building and operating data centers of over 1.5M square feet and fully automated manufacturing facilities. To add to the list, he also built a railroad.
Nabeel will speak at the CDC Auckland on “To sustainability and beyond”. He believes the data center industry has started on the sustainability journey, but “we haven’t started to deliver yet. We are still trying to figure out what needs to be done”. We are still fighting battles with plastics – are they good or not?”
He stresses that the industry’s sustainability challenges are shared with the rest of the world – “It’s a global issue”. However, the growth in requirements for data creates an upward spiral of energy usage: “There’s going to be a greater requirement for data, which is going to require more data centers. There’s more building, so the energy usage of computing is going to rise significantly higher”.
Possibly, the sustainability model needs reworking – “Are we looking at other technologies to build and maintain these infrastructures?” He sees renewable energy sources as playing a role in reducing environmental costs. In this context, Nabeel mentions the possibility of deploying small nuclear reactors next to the facility. “Well, that’s going to be one of those disruptive conversations – are they considered safer than conventional energy generation methods?”
He is looking for his presentation to drive discussion on “the idea that you can’t be carbon negative”. He sees the key idea as more realistic than simply trying to be 100% carbon neutral: “I’d be more than happy to be at 80% [carbon neutral]. We must be sure that we’re not taking too much back from the ecosystem”. He puts sustainability practices in the context of “what the data itself is going to do pertaining to humankind”. He considers how the situation of artificial intelligence being “normalized” and where a simple command does everything will mean “being sustainable”? Who will drive this process – are we getting smarter, or are machines getting smarter?
His keynote will also examine how computing, including quantum, may evolve in the coming few years, the importance of metrics in enabling more sustainable practices and how they might better fulfil that role. Nabeel sees being ‘data-driven’ as key to greater sustainability and looks at the challenge as one that requires multiple inputs: “If we’re data-driven, and we work with our peers and different business units that exist within the data center industry, then we’ll be able to get closer to addressing the problem”.
To learn more and to register, please visit https://w.media/events/new-zealand-cloud-datacenter-convention-2023-2/
