Enormous responsibility will lead to enormous opportunity, Rachel Peterson, VP, data centers at Meta and Noelle Walsh, president, cloud operations & innovation at Microsoft, said during the opening keynote at Datacloud Global Congress this week.
The pair were interviewed on stage by Nancy Novak, chief innovation officer at Compass Datacenters in Cannes for the event. The three executives examined how quickly the data centre industry is scaling, and how both Microsoft and Meta have delivered more in the past few months than in the last two decades.
“The stakes are very different right now in terms of what we’re delivering and the scale at which we’re delivering it,” Peterson said during the keynote.
Walsh added: “[Growth] matters for what it enables. We forget sometimes why we have data centres: to provide connectivity across the world. Bringing those services to broader communities is critical.”
Taking responsibility during a time of change
The panel was eager to address the main opportunities and challenges of the global data centre market to set the tone of the Datacloud event in Cannes. Both Peterson and Walsh acknowledged the significance of the ‘ChatGPT moment’ in 2022, which shifted digital transformation from years to mere months.
“We didn’t see the success [of ChatGPT] coming,” Walsh explained. “We are still going through that enormous growth today.
Peterson added: “It’s an enormous responsibility for everybody in this room and I think we have to be really honest about that.
“We’re developing infrastructure that serves and connects people across the world. In Nevada alone, [Meta] is regularly connecting four million people. This is a profoundly human issue – every decision we make, whether it impacts cooling, power, community, or the environment, has a vast effect.
To ensure the industry is scaling responsibly, the panellists reinforced the importance of partnerships across the ecosystem to build up trust. Given the speed of innovation, investment and the industry delivering entirely different services than before, Peterson emphasised how significant industry collaborations are “critical” to building and facilitating projects.
“To deliver at the scale we have, you have to have the right partners in place,” she said. “Community-wide, we need to make sure we’re genuinely living and breathing as part of the communities we’re operating in. It’s a shared ecosystem – it’s about trust, being consistent and transparent. We have to do all of that to align and develop at this scale.”
Walsh agreed, adding that trust for Microsoft starts with its customers. She explained how the company can only grow so quickly as a result of its partnerships.
“To reach true strategic partnerships in this ever-changing world, you also need agility, mutual transparency and co-innovation,” she added. “The trust that we extend to communities – and that they extend to us – is essential. I think it’s healthy that communities hold us to a high bar and demand that we grow responsibly.”
A community-first response is critical to industry success
How data centres are built and operated is important for the communities they reside in. This is particularly timely, as data centres are starting to enter public understanding more than before, which has led to some resistance to them.
To mitigate public disagreement about these facilities, the panel advocated for working alongside them – being more proactive with their communication and transparency. Both Peterson and Walsh explained how the industry must be held accountable to these standards so that they create lasting value where they operate.
“How we build matters, how we operate matters,” Peterson explained during the keynote. “We have to be far more proactive in communication and transparency: letting people know what our commitments are and allowing them to hold us accountable.”
Top constraints remain power and water for the industry, but the panel remained optimistic about the challenges. Walsh explained how Microsoft would be solving issues as they arise and have made a community-first AI pledge to not increase local power prices.
“We will pay our own way,” she explained. “On water, our new AI designs don’t use it. The intensity of AI chips requires a different cooling system, which means we’ve moved away from water cooling in those designs.”
She added that her primary concern, however, is labour, given the pace of innovation.
“I worry about whether we can train enough people to keep pace with growth,” she said. “That’s both the opportunity and the challenge.”
For Meta, Peterson explained that water and power are critical to scaling the way the company wants to scale. The company is now thinking about energy as a portfolio of investment – different to how it’s approached it historically.
“We’re thinking longer-term: how can we invest in new technologies, long-term energy storage and other innovations,” she said. “We’re developing a new cooling technology that minimises water usage altogether.
“It’s not going to be any one solution, it’s going to be all of [them].”
Changing the narrative
It’s no secret that the data centre industry needs to keep pace with change. For the Datacloud panel, the main priorities are consistency, transparency and ‘following through’ – particularly as they plan to spend even more on their data centre investments.
“If we do this right over the next ten years, we’re here to stay,” Walsh said. “Personally, I don’t think we’ll fully understand what we’re going through until we look back on it in 10 years time.”
Peterson added that, for those who have been in the industry for a long time, what’s happening now is completely different to how they imagined.
“We are at a genuine inflection point,” she said. “We as an industry have an opportunity to define what we’re supposed to be – to change the narrative and get out in front of it. This is not about limiting competition; it’s about building collective credibility for the industry. We have to define that narrative ourselves.”
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