How CommScope is Navigating the Next Evolution of AI

Across Europe, the data centre market is continuing to boom. Increasing AI adoption has led to surging energy demands, with McKinsey suggesting in 2024 that data centre energy use could triple by 2030.

Such a demand for power comes with its own set of challenges for the European data centre industry. Limited sources of reliable power, sustainability concerns and insufficient upstream infrastructure for power access are among the primary hurdles facing the industry.

Lewis White, Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure – Europe at CommScope explains that the advancement of AI is impacting the data centre industry in Europe at a fast pace.

“Generative AI (Gen AI) requires lots of processing connectivity within the data centre,” he explains. “Therefore, power will be a barrier to progress for AI. Either we're going to have to get smarter in how we provide power or we're going to have to use less power.” 

Giving time to infrastructure development

Within Europe, CommScope is prioritising performance and flexibility in order to remain competitive. The company has a history of helping all kinds of business migrate through different network evolutions, whilst staying close to end users.

The first thing is performance, offering its customers additional space to reduce the number of connection losses. This guarantees service in the application which, Lewis explains, is critical for data centres operating AI.

“Our solutions are scalable. We have products in the portfolio that are much more scaled to the mid and smaller sized enterprise,” Lewis says. “It's about making sure that the solutions are scalable and flexible and accessible to all kinds of organisations.”

Flexible manufacturing capacity is another priority for CommScope. Particularly as a global manufacturer, the company needs to give its customers a quick turnaround for availability, whilst maintaining raw supply chains in order to best support AI.

“Flexible manufacturing capacity is something that we've been working hard on,” Lewis notes. “We have lots of additional capacity coming online in factories in Europe, including in-region manufacturing in the UK, Ireland and the Czech Republic.

“AI has no patience. When a project happens, it needs to happen immediately, so time-to-market is really important.”

Navigating data centre complexities

Tackling the AI energy dilemma is no small task. To confront these challenges, CommScope has spent significant time training its organisation to understand AI in terms of the connectivity and data centre markets.

“This means we can ask the right questions to help customers uncover potential obstacles in their existing infrastructure and what they may need to add to accommodate Gen AI,” Lewis explains. “We work closely with the customer, particularly as our products are often bespoke and made to order.

“It means we can provision raw materials like optical fibre cable and we can programme the capacity. We've also been training the integrated community, developing specialist courses to help them understand Gen AI in the data centre.”

As a result of these efforts, CommScope is realising the benefits of AI across the European data centre market already. 

“AI drastically reduces the time to provide a result,” Lewis adds. “One of the benefits we focus heavily on is enabling the larger companies to have AI clusters that the rest of the industry can then procure.”

Making sure AI is sustainable 

A major pitfall of AI is its energy and power demands. Particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic, plenty of larger companies were caught out by their lack of sustainability as their supply chains were not diverse enough.

“Data centres are really challenged by AI, because they significantly drive up the power demand of a data centre, or the equipment, significantly,” Lewis comments. “But AI has the ability to augment lots of things in sustainability, in terms of being able to analyse situations to optimise things like your manufacturing processes. 

“AI is a double-edged sword. It comes with a price, which is the power consumption, but it provides lots of insights that can help you be more sustainable.”

CommScope is now looking at its sustainability strategy from a new angle: to serve the customer.

“When we release a new product, we try to eradicate or dramatically reduce single-use plastics, the amount of energy consumed during its manufacture, its supply chain and its recyclability,” Lewis says. “Then we look at how it’s installed into a customer environment and how the architecture can help with data centre energy efficiency.”

He adds: “We try to help our customers use the most energy efficient design, whilst doing as much as we can in the region. If we can make it in Europe, we will make it in Europe.”

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