Location, Location, Location. When Your AI Data Centers Have to Move to the Available Power, Can Your Structured Cabling Partner Still Support You?

The artificial intelligence (AI) tsunami keeps surging onwards and upwards. This evolution breeds much discussion about its enabling technologies, e.g., what’s coming next; “squeezing” that extra ounce of performance out of the network; how to architect the whole building; and many others. I’m happy to report that CommScope is leading those conversations and innovating the solutions to support future network migration, and we’ll have more to share on those solutions in the future.

However, as the march goes on for AI domination, a new, more commercially-centered topic has emerged: how to power it all. Since AI data centers are pushing the envelope in terms of power demand and available supply, the current build strategy is to move the data center to those regions that have sufficient power availability., including areas outside the traditional Tier 1 markets and looking towards locations like North Dakota in the U.S., Finland, Spain, UAE, Morocco, Indonesia, India and other places where the supply of power is still somewhat readily available.

This prompts other questions in the mind of  data center strategists, such as the availability of skilled labor in these locations, the ability of supply chains to flex and reach these locations, the regulatory environment, and even the question of reliable local knowledge to navigate these new territories.  

It’s those last few questions that are daunting. Technical problems can be hard to solve, but a few smart people throughout history have gone ahead of us and have developed theories, rules and algorithms that can be used to solve those problems, and so very quickly you can discover if an answer is right or  wrong.  But it’s the softer socio-economic questions where right and wrong are harder to discern, and lacking an ideal, it comes down to matters of better or worse and how they can impact project build schedules.

Coming back to the non-Tier 1 locations—and to be clear, there’s no question that these locations are stable or have a highly educated population willing to work in this sector, because they do—the question then shifts to supply and partnerships. The structured cabling partner must have the feet on the street and necessary ecosystem of partners to support your build in these new locations, and be able to answer many of those questions ahead of time.

Increasingly, I seem to be having more conversations with people who must send their data center engineers flying off around the world “this Sunday afternoon” to fix a problem that “we didn’t know about until last night,” for example. When asked why they panic, they often answer with some combination of factors like, “because our current supplier was cheap, and our old network wasn’t as demanding on the infrastructure as AI is today, and our data center used to be next door, so we could run over to swap out a component in the morning and all was well by the afternoon.” Perhaps that sounds familiar, and if it does, you are not alone.

Whilst CommScope is a technology vendor, we’ve also worked hard over the years to develop our PartnerPRO® Network to solve these problems that customers face when trying to deploy their networks globally in new and unfamiliar locations. Through our own international staff and our network of PartnerPRO Partners, we are present on six continents, are able to ship to numerous countries across the globe and, importantly, we are able to converse in many languages.

As an example, I recently took a look at our CTF (CommScope Technical Family) training program, where CommScope picks a technical topic each month and develops content to educate our channel, installation partners and customers. These presentations typically last an hour and are translated and delivered in local languages, by our extensive team of system engineers. We do all that in house. This past September, you could have registered to learn about sustainability for the communications industry in 11 different languages that account for 4.7 billion people, approximately 58% of the global population.

When thinking about new locations for your next AI data center build, ask yourself who offers the structured cabling know-how—and who can support you “over there.” The answer will probably be CommScope and its ecosystem of partners.