Increased Interest in AI from Colocation and Tier 2 Operators, Enterprises, and Cloud Hyperscale Operators Drive the Market
Data center infrastructure, specifically computing, memory, storage, and networking, is in the process of going through a reboot to support the growing artificial intelligence (AI) market, according to a new report from Tractica. Though AI represents just a small portion of a cloud data center’s workload and an even smaller portion of an enterprise’s workload, it drives a different type of application profile and thus requires different architectures and components.
Advances in technology have played a major part in enabling AI expansion and market penetration. In turn, AI applications are driving the development of new silicon and system architectures, storage and networking options, and delivery models. Meanwhile, enterprises are not abandoning on-premise computing and while hyperscalers have been driving AI implementation in the cloud, there is corresponding demand for on-premise and colocated solutions from early adopter enterprises. Tractica forecasts that global revenue for cloud and enterprise data center hardware for AI will reach almost $50 billion annually by 2025.
“Innovations in computing, chipsets, storage, and networking will continue into the future, and these functions will get refined and optimized in order to support artificial intelligence,” says principal analyst Alan A. Varghese. “Hybrid architectures such as public-private clouds will continue to find traction, and the industry will innovate unique implementations that move fluidly between hyperscaler data centers, colocation providers, edge sites, and on-premise.”
Tractica’s report, “Artificial Intelligence in Cloud and Enterprise Data Center Hardware”, examines the AI applications in business, consumer, and government that are driving requirements in AI infrastructure, especially the compute, storage, and networking functions in cloud and enterprise data centers. The report also catalogs the changing nature of the market, ecosystem, vendors, and technologies, including the underlying semiconductors powering the next generation in AI. Market forecasts include infrastructure hardware spend from 2018 to 2025 segmented by region, function, chipset, delivery model, and enterprise vertical. An Executive Summary of the report is available for free download on the firm’s website.
