Digital Realty CTO Chris Sharp discusses market hype surrounding massive AI data center capacity announcements with host Shail Khan.
Insight
Sharp: Advanced reasoning models force AI infrastructure into tier-one hubs
“As you see bimodal, some of these more advanced reasoning models where a token isn't just generated against a prompt, and then you consume it, and it's done. A token may be generated inside of an AI world and go through multiple models to ensure that, you know…”
Opinion
Sharp: Power and financing do not exist for top AI growth projections
“Where, you know, the power, the amount of power, and even the amount of financing required to meet these upper end projections, it doesn't exist, right?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sharp: Data centers built for spiky training runs will face major failures
“There's going to be some probably written about very big challenges and failures where they wanted a total capacity block, but they couldn't support the densification, or they were just building for the spike. It was very spiky, but the longer term utilization…”
Prediction Held up
Sharp: AI inference, not training, will drive future data center growth
“I would say that there's been a lot of growth in that, but we see that kind of leveling out where we really see the consumption of AI or inference that's driving that regional specific growth going forward. And I think that's where it's more embedded. And a lo…”
Assertion Supported
Sharp: Gas turbine delivery backlog extends past 2029
“Some markets were always investigating, you know, different types of, you know, solutions via gas turbines and, Even those are backlog plus 20, 29, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sharp: AI inference deployments require 5-megawatt blocks, unlike training arrays
“What we're really seeing is inference. Can come in, in like, five-ish megawatt blocks, and you can solve for it a bit differently. Now, the densification is still there, and then the private AI pieces, there's hot spots where it can be, you know, a couple of m…”