Guide to investing in data centres: Challenges, opportunities and funding

Foreward

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(Communication)

Long before Samuel Morse invented the Morse Code, humans had found ways to communicate over both time and distance. Cave paintings allowed stories to be passed down through generations, and the invention of the printing press created possibilities for these stories to travel greater distances. Modern day influencers may think they invented the idea of documenting food, but our ancestors were including depictions of food on cave walls as far back as 40,000 years ago.

Our need and desire to communicate may not have changed much over the thousands of years since our ancestors etched those drawings, but it is impossible to ignore that the way in which we communicate has changed and still continues to change. Other than face-to-face communication, our interactions largely take place in the digital world – scrolling social media, checking news sites, streaming films and TV shows, working (remotely or in the office), adjusting our smart thermostats, sending e-mails at work and at home, attending virtual meetings. These things may in themselves make up only a fraction of our day, but when combined it means we spend an average of 13 hours online every single day¹. That’s a little over half our day that is spent in the digital world.

We may access that digital world from our phones, our laptops, our TV’s or our tablets. Yet these are just the gateways. Behind these gadgets sits the backbone of the digital world, the data centre. Data centres don’t operate the cloud, or create AI models, or stream the content. But they do enable it, power it, streamline it, accelerate it.

It is difficult to predict with any accuracy what the future demand for data centre capacity will look like. Whilst the rate of adoption of AI will impact this, so will the types of computer chips that are used and the balance of edge and cloud computing. Whichever figures you look at though, they all predict an increase in demand, and, if we fail to meet that demand, a significant supply deficit.

In this guide we take a closer look at data centres – the types, key challenges and funding, and how securitisation can help bridge the funding gap.

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