The CDIA Summit Has Real Estate & Tech Leaders Talking About the Real Lowdown on Data Centers

The rising tide of anti-data center development has been in the news lately and discussed everywhere from the Nightly News to CNBC and CNN. The displeasure with large data center developments fueled by the mistaken impression that all data centers are the same and all of them use too much water and drive electric bills higher for utility customers is well documented. Is there an answer to these objections that have bubbled up lately and caused a wave of rejections, zoning holdups and demonstrations? The alternative was one of the main points of discussion at the recent CDIA Real Estate and Digital Infrastructure Summit held at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas.

Removing the emotion that has erupted against the move to build giant data centers in many area of the country was a major part of the program at the CDIA Summit and make no mistake- there is an alternative.

CDIA coined the term for this technology “the New AI Edge” or distributed data centers. It can be described as taking the equipment that forms a data center and “distributing” it over many small locations and connecting it with fiber and some sophistic software that connects these locations. The benefits are that an individual location may already, in most cases, have enough power and necessary  fiber to accept a small computer box with the proper chips for it to serve as a portion of the data center operation.

So what came out of the Las Vegas Summit last week? A great deal of very useful and no nonsense information for real estate owners and facility managers that can be used immediately. One of the major sponsors, Available Infrastructure’s @Daniel Gregory stated clearly, “I’m interested in talking with anyone in the audience who may have space to rent.” Available is one of the earliest players building distributed data centers right now and is actively scouting locations to install his equipment. This outreach includes buildings, tower sites, storage facilities and other physical locations.

Another notable comment came from Chris Rising, CEO of Rising Realty Partners who added that “many buildings have already been approved for additional power and are not using the electricity that they have available to them. This removes an obstacle to brining or buying additional power for a mega data center that is one of the major objections. No water is ever used in the edge data center installations.

A major part of the discussion at the event and previous ones was “Robust Connectivity is a Must to Maximize your AI Investment” as our Keynote speaker, @Joseph Boccuzzi, Principal Architect, 5G/6G from Nvidia , has stated before and continues to espouse. His keynote at this event focused on tokenization, how it works and how distributed data centers actually operate. As one of the most well regarded experts in the AI space, having Dr. Boccuzzi interested in educating the CDIA attendees is an honor. He was joined by his colleague, Michael Sherwood, who was the former CIO of Las Vegas and is now on the Nvidia team. He had some of the most relevant experience for the Vegas audience as he discussed his experience with developing a private network and many more innovations in the CIO role.

All in all the CDIA Summit was a huge success and a very important event for the transfer of important information from the real estate leaders and the most valuable company on earth. There is so much more to learn and as CDIA continues to grow as an Association, there will be more and more information to share.

Watch for more stories on the rest of our speakers and sponsors in the future.