Originally posted on VMBlog
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Bob DeSantis, CEO, 365 Data Centers
The data center industry is set to undergo further transformation in 2025, driven, to a great extent, by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and the evolving needs of enterprises in an increasingly digital world. This shift is reshaping digital infrastructure requirements, which will lead to innovative solutions and a rising tide of service provider opportunities.
The early integration of generative and inference AI technologies is already impacting data center capacity planning and power and cooling configurations. As the demand for infrastructure that serves AI workloads becomes more prevalent, data centers are adapting to meet the requirements for both increasing traditional and higher density AI colocation demands. The specialized AI-optimized colocation services that data center providers will be increasingly expected to offer will feature reconfigured power and chilled water systems designed to handle higher-density workloads.
Today, edge colocation compute and storage serve many customer verticals, including content customers and hyperscale cloud customers, to facilitate subscriber and application end-user access to all forms of content and applications such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities and IoT devices. Such facilities will now become increasingly more essential to reduce the latency associated with the transport and processing of the larger AI data sets. In 2025, we can anticipate the increasing demand for regional data centers which serve as key regional network hubs to support AI processing and data set transport.
Key verticals that lean heavily on traditional colocation include:
- Finance
- Hospital Systems & Healthcare
- Pharmaceutical
- Higher Education
- High Tech
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