Data centres power up to meet AI demand as DCI bandwidth set to surge

Survey finds 95% Indian telcos confident in monetising AI traffic; over half expect AI workloads to eclipse traditional cloud soon

Data centre interconnect (DCI) bandwidth demand is predicted to increase by at least sixfold over the next five years, driven primarily by artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. DCI is the technology and networking infrastructure that connects two or more data centres, allowing them to share data and resources efficiently. Communications service providers in India are among the most confident globally (95 per cent) in their ability to monetise AI traffic across their networks, according to a survey conducted by Ciena. More than half of respondents said that AI workloads in a couple of years will overtake traditional Cloud and big data applications. Ciena, a networking systems and software firm, took inputs from 1,300 data centre decision-makers in 13 countries for the survey.­­

 

Feeding AI

• Data centre decision-makers in India and Indonesia expect that more than half of their facilities will be exclusively dedicated to handling AI workloads
• AI workloads expected to place the biggest demand (53%) on DCI infrastructure over the next 2-3 years
• AI workloads will surpass demand made by traditional Cloud computing (51%) and big data analytics (44%)
• DCI bandwidth demand predicted to rise by sixfold over the next five years, driven primarily by AI workloads
• To meet this surge, 87% of respondents believe they will need 800 Gb/s* or higher per wavelength for DCI capacity