Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, said while green data centres are going to be very prominent soon, the next few years would witness those centres being built in the space to tackle infrastructure, mainly power, constraints.
When you think of data centres, all the cooling that’s required for the data centers is huge as 90 per cent of the weight in a rack tends to be the cooling infrastructure, he said.
It’s not the computer but the cooling that actually causes a huge amount of the weight, he said.
“When you go into space, you’ve got solar, the intensity of solar is much higher than what you have on Earth and so the cooling can tend to be at a very different level of economic proportion than what you do over here,” he said.
“And then the energy availability is much higher too. So I think there will be space data centres that are also being built out at the same time,” he said.
There’s going to be innovation across a multitude of different directions, efficiency of power. powering the data centers, on making sure that you’ve got cooling apparatus done in the right way, he said. You need to make sure that you’ve got the right level of connectivity of the data centers, so you can do it where the power is available, he added.
He said the scale is going to be so high that one average you’ll have 10 to 100 AI agents per human.
“If you have 8 billion humans on the planet, you might have between 80 and 800 billion agents and they’re all going to be working 7×24,” he said.
“So imagine the level of kind of infrastructure requirements that are going to be needed. It’s going to be non-trivial,” he said.
“Asked how far or close we are to the space data centres,” Patel said they’re actually starting to get built and the thing that’s really interesting about this market is how quickly the entire industry seems to keep moving.
It’s because the compression of innovation is so much that now what used to happen in 10 years is now happening within six months, he said.
He said it seems like it would make logical sense to make sure you build data centres in space, though there are complexities over there such as how do you make sure that you dissipate cooling and how does cooling work in a vacuum.
All of those pieces need to be solved, he said, while adding that the other big dimension of development is that data centers are going to diffuse across the entire world.
