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Lenovo in partnership with AKT II and Mamou-Mani imagines the data centers of the future: a spa data center
James Cheung, partner at Mamou-Mani
Artificial intelligence is advancing at breakneck speed, forcing a rethink of how the power-hungry servers driving this boom can coexist with the environment – and get less from it.
Data centers are the backbone of the Internet and support almost all digital services. But these facilities require enormous amounts of energy and water and are often considered an eyesore and a burden on the communities that host them. As more AI workloads are deployed in installations, the pressure on electricity supply chains will intensify.
There’s going to be a “tipping point,” where data center architecture is no longer fit for purpose, Simone Larsson, head of enterprise AI at Lenovo, told CNBC.
Faced with a looming digital infrastructure crisis, tech giants and expensive infrastructure developers are exploring sustainable and novel solutions.
Spas and data villages
Traditional data centers are failing to efficiently power AI workloads and are failing to meet sustainability goals and compliance requirements, according to the November “Data Center of the Future” study by Lenovo in partnership with Opinium.
The study found that the majority of IT decision-makers prioritize technology partners that reduce energy consumption, but only 46% of respondents said their current data center design supports sustainability goals.
Faced with 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 sequestered underground using tunnels or disused bunkers, or suspended in the air to use 24/7 solar power.
Lenovo, in partnership with AKT II and Mamou-Mani, imagines the data centers of the future: a data center bunker that uses tunnels or disused transport systems.
James Cheung, Mamouu-Mani
In so-called data villages, servers are stacked in a modular format near urban areas, allowing excess heat from data centers to be transferred to power local facilities like schools or homes. The same goes for data center spas, which would see excess heat from data centers used in a wellness setting. The heat generated by the spa could in turn be reused to power the data center’s cooling technology.
But there’s a catch: Even Lenovo admits that its designs probably won’t be feasible until 2055 or later.
The company said its study was intended to spark discussion and acknowledged that significant regulatory changes would be needed before such designs could be deployed. The cost and technical complexity of certain concepts, as well as legal and scalability constraints, also present challenges.
Adoption would also vary significantly by region. The United States, for example, is more likely to adopt large-scale, ultra-high-density campuses because of high demand, more available land and a relatively flexible regulatory environment, said Perkins Liu, senior research analyst at S&P Global’s 451 Research. At the same time, Europe has a more constrained network and stricter regulations, he said.
This is not to say that new data center designs are an entirely new concept. In 2018, Microsoft deployed a submarine type data center 117 feet below sea level to take advantage of the cooling benefits of seawater and tidal energy to enable the project to be powered entirely by renewable energy.
There are also many examples of operators redistributing heat from facilities to heat neighboring residences. Last summer, the excessive heat of a Equinix the data center was used to heat Olympic swimming pools in Paris.
Lenovo in partnership with AKT II and Mamou-Mani imagines the data centers of the future: a spa data center
Servers in space
From Google “moonshot” The Suncatcher project, the “Three-Body Computing Constellation” initiative of Alibaba and Zhejiang Lab, has Nvidia‘s Starcloud — the race for orbital data centers heats up. Smaller players, including Edge Aerospace and Loft Orbital, are also exploring the technology.
This may sound like science fiction – and indeed Google cites a short story by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov as inspiration for its idea to directly harness the sun as an energy source – but these proposals are being explored more concretely by the tech giants.
The ASCEND study, funded by the EU, in partnership with Thales Alenia Space, studied the feasibility putting centers into orbit using robotic technologies.
Thales Alenia Space is now developing the technology necessary for this process with the aim of carrying out a first demonstration mission in orbit in 2028. In November, Starcloud, the startup supported by Nvidia, sent a chip into space this is 100 times more powerful than any previously existing GPU compute in space.
Around €70 million ($82 million) of private capital has been invested in space data center projects since 2020, according to a report from the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI).
However, in the short term, orbital data centers remain out of reach, as the cost of sending such equipment into space remains a significant barrier.
“Radiation-resistant hardware, cooling in the vacuum of space and the extremely high cost of launching large, energy-dense computing systems into orbit pose major obstacles,” said S&P Global’s Liu. Challenges also include reliable high-speed communications, space debris and maintenance difficulties, he said.
ESPI’s data center cost model depends on the success of Starship’s launch, which is expected to fetch a price as low as $10 million.
“If you ask me now, this is unrealistic in the short term,” said ESPI researcher Jermaine Gutierrez. “In the long term, however, the question is whether terrestrial developments and the continued cost savings that result from them outweigh the cost savings of deployment in space.”
“Faceless mega-monsters”
Lenovo’s Larsson said its futuristic data center plans are focused on coexistence and “symbiosis.” This involves harnessing some of the heat from data centers for use in the community and by other involved stakeholders.
James Cheung, a partner at Mamou-Mani, told CNBC that another goal was to make the installations more visually appealing so they weren’t seen as “faceless box mega-monsters.”
The Data Village involves a system of modular and stackable bricks or modules of data centers linked to the needs of the city. Lenovo in partnership with AKT II and Mamou-Mani has imagined the data centers of the future.
James Cheung, partner at Mamou-Mani
He explained how architects have used techniques such as biomimicry to explore how natural algorithms can show the most efficient ways to disperse heat.
“We interact with [data centers] every day, with our computers and with our phones. But this gentle giant, in the background, is putting massive pressure on water and our resources,” he said.
A sustainability
For many of these innovations to take place, experts told CNBC, regulations will need to be changed and new policies implemented to meet the growing energy demands of AI and data centers.
“Data center operators could adopt green technologies as they wish, but this will have to be financially justified,” said Liu of S&P Global. He added that the grid will need to be improved and renewable energy will need to be developed quickly for this to happen.
Simply modernizing data centers won’t always work, Lenovo’s Larsson said, because it forces operators to “try to get into a cycle that was broken to begin with.”
Instead, companies will need to think outside the box and try to “determine what regulatory constraints should be relaxed in order to serve not only the people of the planet, but also profits.” [of companies]” she said.
