Data centers will experience increased regulation and third-party oversight in 2023 as the world continues to grapple with the industry’s rising energy and water consumption against the backdrop of ongoing climate change. The intensified focus on the overall environmental and community impact of the data center is one of five industry trends for 2023 identified by the global data center experts at Vertiv, a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions.
The advances in chip design and manufacturing that limited server power consumption through the first decade and a half of the 2000s reached their limits in recent years, and a spike in the amount of energy servers use has followed. In a recent report, Silicon heatwave: the looming change in data center climates, the Uptime Institute cited data from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) that showed server power consumption increasing by 266% since 2017. This surge is among various technical and market forces driving the focus on environmental awareness and sustainability in several of the 2023 trends identified by Vertiv’s experts.
“The Asia Pacific data center industry has been on a growth trajectory for some years, with the government now granting infrastructure status to data centers”, said Anand Sanghi, president, ASI, Vertiv. “With the introduction of 5G networks in the country, businesses will require reliable and sophisticated infrastructure to support the increased data loads. As the demand for lower latency increases and more applications operate at the edge of networks, efficient and reliable infrastructure will be at the heart of supporting the new business landscape.”
