Future of the cloud? From spas to orbital space data centers

Artificial intelligence is advancing at a dizzying pace, forcing a rethink of how the power-hungry servers behind the boom can coexist with and take less advantage of the environment.

Data centers form the backbone of the internet and form the basis of nearly every digital service. But the facilities require large amounts of energy and water and are often considered an eyesore and burden on the communities that host them. As more AI workloads are scaled to utilities, pressure on power supply chains will intensify.

There will be a “tipping point” where the architecture of data centers will no longer be fit for purpose, Lenovo’s head of enterprise AI, Simone Larsson, told CNBC.

In the face of the looming digital infrastructure crisis, tech giants and expensive infrastructure developers are exploring sustainable and unconventional solutions.

Traditional data centers are failing to power AI workloads efficiently and failing to meet sustainability goals and compliance demands, according to the November “Data Center of the Future” study conducted by Lenovo in partnership with Opinium.

The study found that the majority of IT decision-makers prioritize technology partners that reduce energy, but only 46% of survey respondents said their current data center designs support sustainability goals.

In the face of these challenges, Lenovo worked with architects from Mamou-Mani and engineers from AKT II to design data centers that could better integrate with the environment and address energy limitations. The result: designs that see data centers hidden underground using unused tunnels or bunkers, or suspended in the air to harness solar energy 24/7.

In so-called data villages, servers are stacked in a modular format near urban areas, allowing excess heat from data centers to transfer power to local amenities such as schools or homes. The same goes for data center spas, which experience extreme heat from data centers used in a healthcare setting. The heat generated by the spa can be reused to power cooling technology for the data center.

But there’s a problem: Even Lenovo admits their design won’t be possible until 2055 or later.

The company said its study was designed to spark debate and acknowledged that significant legislative changes would be required before such designs could be implemented. The cost and engineering complexity of some concepts, as well as legal and scalability restrictions, also present challenges.

Adoption will also vary greatly by location. The United States, for example, is more likely to embrace large-scale, ultra-high-density campuses because of higher demand, more land and a relatively flexible regulatory environment, said Perkins Liu, senior research analyst at S&P Global’s 451 Research. Europe, meanwhile, has a more limited grid and stricter regulations, he said.

This doesn’t mean that new data center designs are a completely new concept. Microsoft in 2018 To ensure the project is fully powered by renewable energy, it built a submarine-like data center 30 meters below sea level to harness the cooling benefits of seawater and tidal power.

There are also many examples of operators redistributing heat from facilities to heating nearby residences. Last summer due to extreme heat Equinox data center Used to heat Olympic swimming pools in Paris.

from google “moonshot” Suncatcher project, Alibaba and Zhejiang Lab’s “Three-Body Computing Constellation” initiative, with NvidiaStarcloud – the orbital data center race is heating up. Smaller players such as Edge Aerospace and Loft Orbital are also exploring the technology.

It may seem like science fiction, and indeed Google cites a short story by science fiction author Isaac Asimov as inspiration for the idea of ​​directly tapping the sun as an energy source, but these suggestions are being explored more concretely by the tech giants.

The EU-funded ASCEND study, in partnership with Thales Alenia Space, investigated the feasibility of launching hubs into orbit using robotic technologies.

Thales Alenia Space is now developing the technology required for this process, with the aim of achieving the first in-orbit demonstration mission in 2028. In November, Nvidia-backed startup Starcloud sent a chip into space that is 100 times more powerful than any GPU computing device previously found in space.

Nearly 70 million euros ($82 million) of private capital has been invested in space-based data center projects since 2020, according to a report by the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI).

But in the near term, orbital data centers will remain out of reach as the cost of sending such equipment into space remains a significant hurdle.

“Radiation-enhanced hardware, cooling in the vacuum of space, and the extremely high cost of launching large, power-intensive computing systems into orbit are major hurdles,” S&P Global’s Liu said. He said the challenges also include reliable high-speed communications, space debris and maintenance challenges.

ESPI’s cost model for data centers hinges on the success of Starship’s launch price being as low as $10 million.

“If you ask me now, that’s unrealistic in the near term,” ESPI research fellow Jermaine Gutierrez said. “But in the long run, the question is whether terrestrial developments and their ongoing cost savings outpace the cost savings from space deployment.”