This Week's Top 5 Stories in the Data Centre Industry
Google is stepping up its long-term strategy in Africa with major investment in digital infrastructure and AI-ready data centres.
The company’s approach combines subsea cable networks, regional cloud regions and education initiatives designed to build both connectivity and technical skills.
James Manyika, Google’s Senior Vice President for Research, Labs, Technology and Society, frames the investment as a chance to ensure equal access.
“With AI, collectively we have the chance to democratise access from the start, ensuring that the digital divide doesn’t become an AI divide,” he explains.
Equinix has officially launched its first International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre in Chennai, India.
Known as CN1, the facility is built on a six-acre site in Siruseri, Tamil Nadu and is connected to Equinix’s three IBX sites in Mumbai.
The company says CN1 will play a vital role in supporting India’s rapid AI and cloud adoption, while strengthening the country’s position as a global hub for digital services.
India is emerging as a focal point for AI development and digital research, with Chennai positioned as a key location in this transformation.
Bain & Company’s (Bain's) sixth annual Global Technology Report highlights the scale of investment required to meet AI compute demand by 2030.
The consultancy estimates that US$2 trillion in annual revenue will be needed to fund the expansion of global data centre capacity, with demand expected to reach 200GW. Even with AI-related savings factored in, Bain calculates that a US$800bn gap remains.
Nvidia has announced a £2bn (US$2.69bn) investment in the UK’s AI startup ecosystem, joining Microsoft and Google in strengthening the country’s AI infrastructure.
The initiative combines venture funding, university partnerships and new data centre builds to support early-stage companies working in artificial intelligence.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s Founder and CEO, sees the UK as a strategic location for growth.
“The UK is in a Goldilocks moment, where world-class universities, bold startups, leading researchers and cutting-edge supercomputing converge. This is the age of AI – the big bang of a new industrial revolution.”
The explosion in AI is reshaping the energy and cooling profile of data centres. Advanced chips and workloads are consuming electricity at unprecedented levels, forcing providers to rethink cooling architectures to remain competitive and sustainable.
Forecasts suggest that by 2030, infrastructure powering large language models could require 327GW of electricity. That is around 70% of all electricity used in the US in 2024.
With each generative AI query consuming around 2.9 watt-hours of electricity – 10 times that of a standard search engine query – the need for efficient data centre cooling has never been greater.
This is something Ecolab addresses directly with its advanced technologies and solutions.
