Flexential: Building Data Centres to Handle AI Demands
As 2025 fast-approaches, the data centre industry is faced with an unprecedented range of challenges as AI continues to reshape infrastructure demands worldwide.
As network constraints continue to emerge alongside power concerns, data centre operators must navigate complex decisions that will define the future of the industry.
With this in mind, industry leaders at Flexential paint a comprehensive picture of the challenges and opportunities ahead for the data centre industry. From energy requirements, to critical talent shortages, their insight reveals how advanced resilience and strategic planning will be essential to meet the next wave of AI-driven transformation.
Public-private partnerships essential to AI infrastructure growth
“The soaring energy needs of AI-driven data centres are capturing attention, but the real challenge lies in securing sustainable energy sources,” explains Chris Downie, Chief Executive Officer of Flexential.
“Public-private partnerships will play a crucial role in addressing these energy demands and help develop alternative energy sources like nuclear and natural gas, which are essential to powering future AI infrastructure.”
The next wave of data centres will be built to handle AI demand, as Chris explains.
“While AI has already driven significant demand for data centres, this is just the beginning. The next wave of data centres will focus on distributed architectures to handle AI inference at scale, which will require more robust hybrid cloud environments,” he says.
Urgent talent gaps will impact data centres in 2025
“With the rapid expansion of the data centre industry, 2025 could see a critical shortage of talent needed for core roles like infrastructure engineers and operators. I’m worried that this talent gap could grow and eventually impact innovation and growth in a field that is facing high demands for both,” comments Ryan Mallory, Chief Operating Officer at Flexential.
“For this reason, workforce development must be a major priority in 2025 so that we can create educational pathways to avoid a major skills gap.”
Ryan highlights that there is a growing need for data centre resilience in order to combat cyber threats, which will only continue to rise.
“With climate change intensifying and cyber threats growing more sophisticated, data centres in 2025 are expected to operate with robust disaster recovery plans that go beyond the basics,” he says. “Enhanced environmental controls, strategic facility placements, and adaptive workforce models are the keys to resilience moving forward.
“As data centres become more vital to every sector, understanding these disaster readiness upgrades is critical to future-proofing digital infrastructure.”
Network concerns could rival power concerns
“Concerns about the growing power demands of data centres have been dominating headlines lately. But as data centres scale to meet massive AI training and inference computing needs, available networking bandwidth and fibre resources have emerged as the next critical challenge in 2025,” says Jason Carolan, Chief Innovation Officer at Flexential.
“Fibre build outs at the edge, higher capacity subsea cables, and reducing network latency will become pressing concerns as data capacity pushes the limits of today’s infrastructure. Network readiness is a crucial factor to consider in the future of data centre deployments.”
Likewise, Flexential believes that, as far as the imperative for long-term planning and purchasing capacity is concerned, the gap is widening between hyperscalers and enterprise-level organisations.
“As hyperscalers purchase data centre capacity years in advance, organisations at the enterprise level have yet to realise that their pace of purchasing needs to change in order to keep up,” explains Patrick Doherty, Chief Revenue Officer of Flexential.
“This will ensure that these mid-level organisations have what they need two to three years from now and that this gap doesn’t continue to grow. We’ve adapted to these shifting macroeconomic trends by having transparent conversations with our partners and customers about what we’re seeing and how they can best prepare for this shift.”
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