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Eliot Knudsen's avatar

I love where this is going, and I plan to write a longer article purely on the network and virtualization components after getting several pings on this post here:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7217119913419714560/

That said, this reads like a ChatGPT prompt: "What are the eleven essential components of a data center?" :)

milind's avatar

thanks for the detailed in depth coverage Jamin.

Curious to know how Broadcom missed the cut in your analysis, especially in networking products at least

Super Micro also deserves some mention

Suman Suhag's avatar

Big Data is gaining traction among various industries. According to IBM, people produce 2,500 trillion bytes of data daily. 50 billion IoT and other connected devices gather, analyze, and share it (as CISCO states). Big Data unlocks an excellent opportunity for big insights — available for companies of any domain and size.

Big Data should no longer be regarded as an afterthought. Using the information outside your company’s own data sources, it perfectly fits in your business intelligence solutions and expands the comprehension of the market and customers. The companies that will stay afloat — and ultimately lead the pack — will be the ones that put Big Data amongst such priorities as revenue, profitability, and customer experience.

According to the Broadcast Audience Research Council, Big Data solutions contributed to better decision-making (69%), improved customer experience (52%), and significant cost decrease (47%). What’s more, companies bragged about an 8% increase in revenue and a 10% cost reduction because they treated their Big Data properly.

Tabu's avatar

How about the AI driven robotics? I guess that should be a big component!

Disruptive Investment Ideas's avatar

4th Industrial Revolution is big tag line, much can be connected. I think, we should not overestimate the value of the datacenter. Yes, everything makes this currently the key element of this revolution.

However, knowing that we have another ten or more years until peak, I think we should be aware that Neuromorphic Engineering will remove the need for central (data centre) processing. Most compute will shift with it to the edge.

Mark Bagley's avatar

Good to highlight how front and center the role of the DC will be in this Industrial Revolution. Overused analogy, but each of the constituents of a DC are the equivalent of the picks and shovels of the gold rush, a lot of money flowing in and through AI will make it into this layer.

There has been a lot of noise, rightly, around the crucial role and scarcity of the GPU, but as the article points out access to energy will perhaps be equally crucial. Not just the closeness, but the efficient use of it and the sustainability of it [renewable sources and reliability of access].

I wonder whether a late entrant left field in the form of xAI is going to sweep all in front of them. Just on the DC infrastructure side, they already have plans to build a 100mW DC, largest existing is ~25mW. They have the solar and battery tech behind them from Tesla providing flexibility of access - buy when cheap and use solar, but store both in batteries to use when energy is expensive. Surely a large amount of arbitrage opportunity there. And then the DC build itself is really a continuous manufacturing process refinement play - most DCs change all their components continuously over a 3 year cycle, scope for that to accelerate and that will bring huge differentiation.