Data centers have been around since the 1990s, providing environments for the stable operation of IT equipment, and their importance to our modern world increases every year. Smartphones are now widespread, and we as individual consumers enjoy all sorts of services via the Internet, from entertainment, including music, videos, and comics, to banking. The systems that make this happen reside in data centers. In the business world, too, it is gradually becoming the norm to use the cloud for corporate information systems that were previously located in corporate server rooms (on-premises), and the IT infrastructure that supports these cloud services also resides in data centers. The environment surrounding data centers is undergoing transformative change, and there are currently four prevalent trends.
Trend 1: Hyperscale shift
As cloud services grow and spread rapidly, they are being supported by hyperscale data centers efficiently accommodating massive amounts of IT equipment, more so than conventional data centers. These hyperscale data centers have huge power receiving capacities on the order of several dozen megawatts (MW), equivalent to over 10,000 regular households. In spite of this, they also help to reduce environmental load by being highly efficient in their operations, with high energy-saving performance.
Trend 2: Creation of edge computing markets
The mainframe (centralized system) of the 1980s was replaced by personal computers (decentralized systems). In and after the 2000s, servers that were previously dispersed have increasingly become centralized on the cloud. Accordingly, it is said that computing systems continuously cycle through centralization and decentralization phases. If the cloud and hyperscale data centers represent centralization, edge computing, which is when data is processed at the edge of network, represents decentralization. As IoT, AI, and 5G technologies become more commonplace, edge computing, which involves the storage and processing of data close to the edge (users and end devices), is making inroads into a wide range of industries, including the healthcare, entertainment, distribution and logistics, manufacturing and agriculture industries.
Trend 3: Carbon neutrality
The carbon neutrality of data centers will be achieved through energy-saving measures that make it possible to use energy more efficiently (transition to energy saving) as well as the shift toward renewable energy with net zero carbon emissions (transition to renewable energy). Japan’s Act on the Rational Use of Energy was revised in 2022 to introduce a benchmark system setting a power usage effectiveness (PUE) target for the data center industry of 1.4 or lower, and companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Prime Market are effectively obligated to disclose information about climate change risks based on the TCFD*1 recommendations. As such, carbon neutrality has become a pressing issue in the data center industry.
*1: The TCFD (Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures) was established by the G20's Financial Stability Board (FSB) to study the issue of how companies should disclose climate-related information and how financial institutions should respond.
Trend 4: Automation of operations
On top of hyperscaling and the sheer number of data centers operated for edge computing, the scope of their operations is expanding to include power generation and storage facilities, the management of renewable energy value (such as non-fossil fuel certificates), and other areas due to energy-saving and renewable energy initiatives. In these circumstances, the automation of operations is a crucial part of operating high-quality data centers with limited operational resources. There is a broad and diverse array of operational tasks that can be automated, including tasks using AI to predict and detect failures, air conditioning control tasks, and unstaffed facility access management tasks.
