What the region’s data centres can learn from UAE’s Olympic swim team

Image: Getty Images/ Kong Ding Chek

At the upcoming Olympics, swimming is set to make a big splash, especially in the UAE, with the country pegging its hopes for glory on the two talented swimmers, Yousef Rashed Al Matroushi (men’s 100m freestyle) and Maha Abdullah Al Shehi (women’s 200m freestyle), who will represent the nation as part of its 14-member squad.

The excitement surrounding their participation highlights the ever-increasing level of talent in the region, buoyed by the availability of world-class facilities.

State-of-the-art swimming pools in the Middle East today not only foster athletic excellence but also boast impressive capacities. These pools, often holding millions of litres of water, are marvels of modern engineering.

Interestingly, the immense water volumes in these Olympic-sized swimming pools draw a fascinating parallel to another marvel of modern infrastructure: data centres.

On average, a single large data centre generates enough heat energy to warm approximately 100 Olympic-sized swimming pools for an entire month.

This intriguing comparison offers a unique lens to explore the evolving pressures and paradigms shaping the Middle East data centre market.

As we delve into the dynamics of both swimming and data centres, we uncover surprising correlations that reveal much about the region’s technological aspirations.

Learning from Olympic athletes: Prep and commitment

Just as gold-hopeful Olympians prep and plan, so must data centre operators set new benchmarks of excellence. Performance and efficiency must take top billing in the ambitions of facility managers.

Providers must be open to implementing any emerging technology or best practice that helps them reduce energy consumption, whether this is in the system’s hardware itself, the cooling systems surrounding it, or the use of renewable energy sources to power it.

When it comes to cooling systems, minimising the amount of water and other coolants used in the process is where the significant benefits can be found. As for other materials, reuse and recycling are must-haves in the race to efficiency and performance optimisation.

When the UAE’s Olympic swim team take to the pool, they should know that they will be able to stand (we hope, on a winner’s podium) with pride and recount the responsible way that event organisers have heated the water. Commercially and economically speaking, human progress cannot stop. But nor should the pastimes and callings that make us human.

Our sports define us and bring us together, so we owe it to ourselves to ensure that we use the smartest ways to host events. Data centre heat export — the capture and repurposing of heat generated by data centre equipment — could allow us to do just that.

Now, let’s talk about AI, which along with 5G, blockchain, and others, is a data-heavy and processing-heavy technology that contributes greatly to the heat generated by data centres.

In June, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled Rubin, a new AI chip architecture, and told the media and his industry peers that his company would start releasing chips in a “one-year rhythm”. This would cut Nvidia’s previous release cycle in half amid a market that is, one could say, “heating up” competitively. This move speaks to a 100-metre sprint race in the chips market and calls for innovation in cooling approaches such as liquid immersion and direct-to-chip.

Rack stroke

Just as Olympic records give today’s athletes something to aim for, chip designers look to improve the performance of older products. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling is one such breakthrough. It deploys methods that target the heat-generating elements of the chip with water or a dielectric fluid that acts as a direct coolant. Cooling components like single-phase cold plates, two-phase evaporation units, and immersion systems are introduced to the surfaces of CPUs, GPUs, and other fundamental components of computing hardware.

And like a well-equipped athlete, the optimally performing data centre will use the latest tools and equipment to boost efficiency. Free air cooling cannot always meet the needs of modern facilities alone. Liquids, on the other hand, can be up to 3,000 times more efficient than air in absorbing heat and retaining it. Liquid systems consume less energy because they achieve better contact with heat sources. Liquid cooling is quieter and uses less space, enabling the deployment of higher-density racks.

In the race to the finish, efficient energy utilisation is the difference between podium glory and feet-shuffling obscurity. Energy consumption can make or break a data centre. It impacts performance, compliance, operating costs, and increasingly, consumer goodwill. Nowadays, every business is under pressure to maintain supply chains that live up to scrutiny.

As such, sustainability has become a major focus for data centres. And while heat-recovery techniques may not be widely applicable in the GCC, green energy sources will have a huge role to play in the coming years.

Dive in

Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky, Mark Spitz, Kristin Otto — swimmers of renown etched on the tablet of Olympic history. We all want a legacy. Today’s data centres have an opportunity to build similar reputations by embedding gold standards in their design. They can meet not only the demands of now but also establish benchmarks that guide future operators when they respond to the new, resource-intensive applications of their time.

In the race to ultimate data centre performance, there are a range of positions to take — from the spectator watching it all unfold from the safety of their living room to the Olympic swimmer laying out strong stroke after strong stroke with gold in sight. It is time to decide where in this spectrum we see ourselves. And as the UAE’s Olympic heroes make their mark on the world stage, I hope that our regional data centre operators will be inspired to step up to gold standards too.

The writer is the managing director MENA at Equinix.