Sharp: Advanced reasoning models force AI infrastructure into tier-one hubs
Chris Sharp · The state of play of data center development · Jun 12, 2025 · at 8:55
Digital Realty CTO Chris Sharp explains why complex inference workloads cannot easily relocate to remote sites with stranded power.
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“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, it's not hallucinating or that it has a mixture of experts or a depth expertise in that outcome of that token. So that's where these ecosystems of other AI infrastructure being proximate to itself, not only just the data, but I would be remiss not to hit that AI is only as smart as the data sets you feed it, and so those training, you were able to feed that monolithic set of data in the middle of nowhere, but now we're more real-time, micro-learning, inference. It's starting to become more approximate to where the data oceans and that data gravity, which we've produced a report a long time ago, is happening around these availability zones and these epicenters of these tier one markets.”
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