Chris Sharp, CTO of Digital Realty, discusses whether the AI boom will cause geographic dispersion or reinforce existing regional cloud availability hubs like Northern Virginia.
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…”
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?”
Opinion
Sharp: Gigawatt announcements are often just 'braggawatts' ignoring real demand
“There's a lot of noise, like one of the things we've been joking about is a lot of braggawatts. Oh, I have a gigawatt. I have a gigawatt. And there's just so much noise out there that you really want to get underneath the workload and the durability of the com…”
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…”