Onward, a Fundrise Production 49: Data centers will be the largest investment in US history, with Kervin Pillay, former CTO of Cisco
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Jul 9, 2025 Kervin Pillay, former CTO of Cisco's Automation Group, dives into the transformative future of data centers. He emphasizes the enormous investment looming in the U.S. to build AI infrastructure, potentially dwarfing the capital spent on the Interstate Highway System. Pillay tackles the innovative cooling solutions needed for AI data centers and compares the energy strategies of the U.S. and China. He also discusses the shift from training to inferencing in AI, affecting hardware demands, and highlights the hybrid models that tech giants are using to enhance user experiences.
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Data Center Build Basics
- Building a data center starts with securing massive power and suitable location with environmental approvals.
- Design must match workload type, balancing power density, cooling, and redundancy before construction begins.
AI Data Centers Are Uniquely Demanding
- AI data centers use up to 8 times more power per rack and require water cooling instead of air cooling.
- Such cooling and power needs fundamentally change data center design, operation, and infrastructure.
Environmental Challenges of Data Centers
- Data centers generate intense noise, heat, and require large volumes of filtered water.
- These environmental impacts restrict their location and necessitate specialized noise and heat mitigation measures.