OPINION
Opinion
CHASING NET ZERO IN THE ZETTABYTE ERA
Investments in data centres are booming , but the challenge is how to keep these complex buildings cool and energy efficient .
Photo by Derek Sutton on Unsplash
By Bernie Devine , Regional Director Asia Pacific , Yardi Systems
Surging internet usage and smartphone adoption , rampant social media , e-gaming and video streaming , an uptick of next-generation big data , smart cities and Internet of Things applications … all this ( and more ) is fuelling demand for data centres across the world .
But can the real estate sector keep up the pace , both from a cost and , more importantly , from a climate mitigation perspective ?
Gartner predicts global data centre infrastructure will reach $ 200 billion in 2021 , an increase of 6 % from 2020 . JLL estimates the hosting , storage , and cloud computing market across the Asia Pacific region will grow by more than 150 % in just two years .
Everyone from the tech titans to emerging players are looking to the Asia Pacific to meet that demand . In a market entering a new cycle of growth , there are enormous opportunities ahead . terms . Complex management can make scale and profitability a challenge . And a blistering rate of technological change can make obsolescence an ongoing headache . But these challenges are not insurmountable when the weight of capital is so vast .
An even bigger challenge is responding and adapting to climate change in an era of exponential data growth . How do data centre operators chase net zero in the zettabyte era ?
Building For Bytes
We are generating 500 million tweets , 294 billion emails , four million gigabytes of Facebook data , 65 billion WhatsApp messages and 720,000 hours of YouTube content each and every day , according to the World Economic Forum .
Sure , the hurdles to investment remain high . Costs can be eyewatering – roughly the same price as a hospital in square metre
All that data – which is expected to grow to 175 zettabytes by 2025 – needs to be stored somewhere . One zettabyte of coins ,
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