According to a recent analysis by Synergy Research Group, the capacity of hyperscale data centers will be three times higher by 2030 than it is today. What’s the reason behind this? You can probably guess: yes, AI! In recent years, the trend has always been that the critical load on hyperscale data centers has been steadily increasing, but that growth has only accelerated thanks to AI services and generative AI technology!
The pressure on data centers is constantly increasing due to AI
Since the advent of AI and various generative solutions, the pressure on data centers has been steadily increasing. Energy demand in data centers is constantly rising, but how are they responding to this? After all, this is not the only challenge facing data center operators. Rising energy costs and stricter environmental regulations do not make it any easier to meet the ever-growing demand. Nevertheless, experts predict that the capacity of hyperscale data centers will continue to grow significantly and will be at least three times higher than it is today by the time we reach the year 2030.
More data centers, but also larger data centers
Capacity must therefore be increased. To achieve this, companies are not only building new data centers, but also larger ones. According to the Synergy report, there were 1,103 operational hyperscale data centers worldwide at the end of 2024. In addition, 497 more facilities were in the planning stages. Alongside planning new locations, many data centers are being expanded to increase capacity. The total number of data centers will certainly continue to grow this year, but what stands out most is that they are becoming significantly larger. On average, new data centers are twice as large as their predecessors. One reason for this is the introduction of GPU-oriented infrastructure, which is indispensable for the workloads associated with artificial intelligence. Existing data centers were primarily CPU-based, but AI requires a shift toward GPUs and other specialized hardware. So not only are more data centers being added this year, but they are all getting bigger as well.
Energy-efficient data centers
The energy consumption of data centers naturally remains a topic of debate, especially as more and larger data centers are built. Environmental regulations are becoming increasingly strict, so it is essential to develop low-carbon alternatives for data centers as well. A report by Atlantic Ventures and Nutanix indicates that data centers could reduce their CO2 emissions by 19 million tons over the next six years. That is comparable to the emissions of 4.1 million cars and is certainly not negligible. These savings can be achieved through energy efficiency and the use of on-demand compute capacity in the cloud. The transition to HCI can also lead to annual energy savings of 27% compared to traditional data center architectures. According to the report, these energy savings could yield around 25 billion euros by 2030!