Over the past year, AI has dominated headlines. You can't read the news, browse on LinkedIn, or even purchase appliances (‘AI’ powered toothbrush anyone?), without seeing those two letters positioned front and center - and for good reason.

Artificial intelligence is bringing the next generation of computing to the masses, offering high-performance capabilities to myriad industries, and reshaping how we live our everyday lives.

As the data center industry knows all too well, in order to meet this demand, the digital infrastructure underpinning all this compute must be scaled and innovated to sustain the growth of AI.

Reliability will of course be at the center of data center design and operations, but as recent events have not-so-gently reminded us, the impact of outages is being felt far more widely owing to our increasing dependence on digital infrastructure.

The technology sector is already rising to the challenge of accommodating AI workloads, figuratively sharpening the cutting edge of data center design, but with any novel technology will also come significant hurdles.

With so much change and numerous adaptations required against a backdrop of grid instability, environmental priorities, the ongoing talent shortage, political turbulence and numerous other factors, it seems like an almost insurmountable task that is being asked of the digital infrastructure sector. Though, as we have seen through the technological epochs that have followed since the inception of the transistor in the '40s, the industry continues to rise to the challenge.

Introducing AI Week

To play our part in aiding the market in tackling these challenges, DCD will be running AI Week from Monday - a special series of carefully curated content that will explore how the industry is adapting its strategies and planning ahead to support AI across every layer of the tech stack.

During the week of July 29th to August 2nd, we'll be publishing broadcast episodes, a supplement, talks, and industry opinions, amongst other content that will provide a cohesive and up-to-date review of how the AI market is shaping up.

By exploring innovations and challenges from the grid level to the chip level, we aim to help educate and inform the digital infrastructure sector and drive knowledge sharing and ongoing collaboration in this space.

Some of the overarching themes we look forward to covering during AI week include, but are certainly not limited to:

The power problem: Arguably, power is the biggest problem facing the proliferation of AI. Traditional data center operations are already under immense strain to secure reliable and low/no carbon electricity from archaic and unstable grids, and high-density facilities are only set to compound this demand.

Whilst average rack power currently sits at around 12kW, discussion of 50kW racks (and beyond), are by no means a shock to the industry, but will present major hurdles as the market endeavors to accommodate these higher and higher densities. AI Week sets out to contextualize the power problem, and explore innovations from SMRs to HVO, load balancing to hydrogen fuel cells, to clarify how the data center market is charting a course to powering the next generation of computing.

Energy efficiency, sustainability and other ESG priorities: Talking of power, we must also talk about efficiency. Decarbonization remains a top priority for the digital infrastructure sector, but as the buildout of the market continues to accelerate, industry leaders must employ strategies that facilitate growth without compromising sustainability.

Securing cleaner, greener primary and backup power is a key part of the puzzle, but how are data centers embedding the ‘S’ and the ‘G’ of ‘ESG’ into their roadmaps to ensure they progress on the road to net-zero?

Thermal management for high densities: With great (rack) power, comes great responsibility. You don’t need me to tell you how big a challenge cooling is, but as the second biggest power draw in the data center, selecting the right mix of thermal management tools is both mission and business critical.

Chip-level innovations: Nvidia hasn’t yet fulfilled the backlog of orders for Blackwell, and Rubin is not too far behind it. Symptomatic of the increasing rapidity of tech refresh rates, the annual updates to GPU offerings demonstrate the insatiable hunger for AI applications, but the underlying infrastructure must also be scaled and adapted to accommodate higher-performance chipsets, whether GPUs or other chip architectures.

Not forgetting the networks: Power and cooling have commanded the attention of headlines in the current AI cycle, yet connectivity is the fundamental business of data centers. During AI Week, we make a concerted effort to shed light on the pressures being put on connectivity and explore the network innovations that are allowing us to keep data flowing.

Macro trends and the AI hype cycle: Whilst perspectives of where we are in the hype cycle differ, the data center market must adapt to support workload evolution, whilst contending with more market challenges and geopolitical tensions than we have seen before. After all, no matter your stance, we can all agree that the stakes have never been higher.

Kicking off the conversation on all things AI, we are excited to be joined by Giordano Albertazzi, CEO and President of the Americas, Vertiv, in the DCD studio for the inaugural episode of AI Week. Gio will set the tone for this series by talking holistic thinking, market trends and industry priorities, starting the week-long dialog with key players across the digital infrastructure supply chain, to help accelerate AI adoption.

With over 40 speakers and contributors to this series (with over 1,000 years of combined industry experience), DCD is thrilled to play its part in facilitating this incredibly timely and important conversation.