Walt Coulston, Founder and CEO of GreenSquareDC will make a number of important contributions to CDC Sydney on 14th September. He will join the expert panel which looks at the question “What does digital transformation mean for the design and build of data centers?”. He will also be part of a Fireside Chat later in the day on the subject of “Australia’s AI opportunity and its environmental burdens” . Both of these sessions will reflect the vision and strategy that Walt is putting into practice as he assembles the GreenSquareDC portfolio.
He believes strongly that the data center industry is at an inflection point as digital technologies, in particular AI, start to impact the basis of their design and operation:
“Everything that has happened in the past in relation to data centers, for example their how they’re built, where they’re built, how big they are and their environmental impact, forget that, because AI is going to change everything”.
The impact he sees will include a huge increase in demand for data centers – Walt estimates five to 10 times more with a parallel increase in power demand: “The average kilowatt per rack is in the order of 6 to 8 kW/rack. Then you start going into AI and it goes from 30 to 40 to 50”. And its only day one in terms of AI, these densities and the impacts he sees as arising from it are only going to increase further and further.
Walt stresses the importance of this trend to the industry as it occurs just as the industry attempts also to decarbonise and to transition to renewable energy sources. Since he sees the delivery of the roll out of the required 10,000 kilometres of high voltage power lines in Australia by 2030 as highly unlikely, the availability and cost of power may force the hand of data centers to more local power sourcing: he has over 3000 hectares of land for his own large wind and solar farm to support GreenSquareDC’s flagship 96MW WAi1 data centre in Perth
“Just imagine that data centers are consuming somewhere between 10 and 30% of the global grid by 2030. And with the roughly 10-fold increase in power required to facilitate AI workloads, the upper end of this range isn’t at all unimaginable. How do you think we’ll be perceived at that time, when the global grid is under unprecedented stress and power, including renewable power, is at a premium, unless we make some massive changes? It doesn’t take Einstein to figure out there’s a few things to be worried about …. Just relying purely on carbon offsets, or even worse, optional carbon offsets, may not cut it in the future”.
These issues are just some of those Walt will be speaking about in his Fireside Chat – meeting the unprecedented growth in AI demand sustainably and using technology to help meet that challenge.
For further information and to register, please visit https://w.media/events/sydney-cloud-datacenter-convention-2023/