Terry Storrar, Managing Director, Leaseweb UK, makes his predictions and names his priorities for the year ahead.
2025 predictions
In terms of technology trends impacting the data centre industry, the rapid growth of AI is driving even more focus on GPUs, as well as higher power and density. The ability to deliver controlled power in a denser environment is more essential than ever to meet customer compute demand.
Data centres are now looking at density spaces that far outweigh the kilowattage that has been offered in the past. With this, there must be a commitment to cooling, power, energy, and of course, sustainability. We are not seeing anything completely new at the back end that is radically different from a year ago – the priority is still getting servers to do more and deliver higher compute.
The continued development of AI use in data centre operations is important, particularly for reporting tools and systems that help increase efficiencies and drive down energy usage. Far from greenwashing, the data centre industry has very much grown up in the past few years and is addressing the huge challenges that power requirements present. Harnessing data through reporting is a powerful way to do things better and data centres will be finetuning this more in 2025.
Data centre providers also need to continually provision for more services that support flexible hybrid infrastructure models as customers fully realise the benefits of moving workloads between different environments. Those in the data centre industry will see increasing use of multi-cloud environments, as organisations seek to optimise their cloud environments for their own individual needs, and will play a key part in shaping the highly fluid IT infrastructures of the future.
The impact of this year’s world events, including major political elections, cannot be underestimated. As a result, some of the brilliant and innovative technology developments in areas such as AI and biometrics have lost some momentum. In 2025, there is hope that more stability will inspire renewed confidence and a reinvigoration of the market. The data centre industry as a whole needs to balance looking after the planet and invest in the right technologies for the higher power demands of the future.
2025 priorities
The need to demonstrate investment in sustainability will be an absolute priority in 2025 for all those in the data centre sector.
Achieving compliance with targets will be paramount. It is hugely important that data centre suppliers and services are doing everything possible to meet industry standards such as ISO 14001:2015. These types of environmental credentials are a key differentiator for end-customers – it is very marked that sustainability is one of the first areas that customers ask about when they are evaluating data centre services. No matter what sector an end-customer is in, these businesses can no longer ignore their own accountability to environmental targets.
And it’s not just achieving initial certification in green credentials. Maintaining standards is just as challenging for those in the data centre industry. It is important to plan for long term investment as the industry will only become more stringent with sustainability measurements, so this will be a high priority in 2025.
With customer demand fuelling the development of even higher-powered servers, investment into areas such as cooling is huge. There are plenty of initiatives focusing on new cooling systems such as water-cooling servers, and fully water-cooled racks to manage finite energy resources more efficiently.
As an industry, we also need to improve ways to tap into renewable energy sources, including wind and solar power. There are also companies researching how to neutralise carbon and this will eventually provide improvements for the data centre industry.
Aside from sustainability, data centre specialists cannot shy away from topical issues such as data sovereignty. Although this first raised its head a few years ago, it is essential that providers keep up to speed on how world events and sensitivities can impact where data should be stored, so that appropriate provision for this is built into customer infrastructures.
Data centre experts are also helping to shape key data sovereignty initiatives such as the European Cloud Campus. This will enable companies to develop AI and cloud applications that work on data stored and processed within Europe, bolstering the European Commission’s drive to achieve a sovereign European cloud. Collaboration in initiatives such as this will also be imperative for next year alongside rigorous environmental targets.
