JB Baker of ScaleFlux Explores AI Infrastructure, Sustainability in Data Centers, and the Flash Industry
With the tremendous focus on AI and growth in AI infrastructure in 2023, how will other IT infrastructure initiatives be impacted?
JB Baker: The AI avalanche accelerates attention to Sustainability and Efficiency in other aspects of the IT infrastructure. All anyone could talk about in 2023 was AI, its wide-ranging potential to change how businesses operate, and its “share of IT wallet” grab (as reflected by NVIDA’s revenues in particular). What was not as publicized was how the massive growth in infrastructure deployment (particularly GPUs, Memory, and Networking) creates challenges for the data centers’ ability to handle the new demand for power to operate the hardware running the AI workloads. At the OCP Global Summit in October, keynotes from industry leaders hit on this point multiple times. As users deploy AI into existing data centers, they will be forced to find efficiency and sustainability improvements in other areas. Without improving the power, space, and cost of storage, networking, general-purpose computing, and cooling the data centers won’t have enough power to feed the AI beast. Enabling power efficiency at the system level through innovations in the storage and memory domains is a key focus for ScaleFlux.
