To meet the demands of the artificial intelligence (AI) era, data centres must offer flexible evolution, be always on and be optimised for space and speedy construction. Fan Shixing, Director of Huawei’s Data Centre Facility Integration Business Department, delivered this key message at the AfricaCom conference, held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre this month. His keynote address stressed the need for a new generation of AI data centres (AIDC) to support the continent's increasing desire for advanced, intelligent capabilities.

“Huawei has developed new data centre solutions that use full-stack synergy technology for liquid cooling,” said Fan as he spoke about the impact of Huawei’s FusionBlock DC solution in Africa. “It offers flexibility, simple construction and around-the-clock data recovery to ensure business continuity.” Huawei’s objectives in this arena are to build green, flexible and reliable ICT infrastructure, to empower an intelligent Africa.

As enterprises and citizens ramp up their AI use through generative models and the broader uptake of AI increases, the energy used by data centres will grow. This is because the technology yields many potential benefits for sectors like healthcare, education, manufacturing and more, making it an attractive way to increase efficiency and productivity. But if people are to reap these benefits, data centres must operate through interconnected high-speed networks to deliver high computing power.

Fan explained that these AIDCs will no longer rely on CPU-centric architecture but instead transition to the xPU platform. This will enable rack densities of between 5kW and 15kW to rise to more than 40kW – all supported by liquid air cooling to achieve a higher power usage effectiveness (PUE) score of 1.15. “This liquid cooling not only helps save energy, it improves the server density per unit of space, thereby improving computing efficiency and the stability of the data centre,” added Fan. Next-generation AIDCs must be built faster and be easy to scale up in future.

The issue of scale is essential to enabling industry growth as technologies advance and demand for AI services grows. The FusionBlock DC’s prefabricated assembly solution is best suited to meet the requirements of AIDC deployments that may need to be expanded after installation. When compared with once-off construction, the initial investment can be reduced by 30% with this solution, an attractive offering for businesses that need to efficiently spend every dollar.

This solution provides highly reliable services and has best-in-class disaster recovery functionality. Should any natural disasters affect the data centre’s location, FusionBlock is built to resist level nine seismic events, and level 17 winds, and it has a two-hour fire rating and good corrosion protection as well as heat insulation.

The components of the structure such as power, cooling and IT modules are used to enable parallel factory prefabrication and on-site construction. This means that if a data centre needs 100 cabinets and eight megawatts of capacity, the delivery period can be 3.5 months faster than a traditional data centre build, lowering the overall delivery time by 25%. With this product, Fan said: “Huawei offers both optimal space utilisation efficiency and shortens the time to market, therefore addressing the urgent need for fast and efficient data centre construction in Africa.”

Energy efficiency and green solutions within FusionBlock DC

AIDCs will integrate data centre infrastructure, IT, platform and industry applications, to advance industry intelligence. The FusionBlock solution collects data at three levels to ensure optimisation and efficiency. First, it monitors the water temperature and flow data coming from cooling towers and cooling distribution units to ensure optimal performance. Then the power consumption and temperature from cabinets and servers are monitored by sensors. Thanks to this, FusionBlock’s full stack can have more than 10% on energy costs.

“These monitoring systems are supported by three model algorithms that perform basic association, service association and cross-domain association to further optimise energy savings.”

Additionally, businesses that use FusionBlock DC will rest assured that their data can reliably be accessed and securely stored thanks to Huawei’s unified data recovery service. When organisations need to migrate their data or consolidate their information, Huawei’s all-in-one data centre-level services are on hand to ensure a smooth transition.

Partnerships for digital transformation

“More open minded and pragmatic actions are needed to build green, digital infrastructure and thus accelerate the intelligent era,” said Fan. He stated that in the continental drive for digital transformation, no enterprise can succeed alone. “Only through collaboration can we achieve great things,” he added.

As a partner to enterprises on the continent, Huawei is committed to exploring the infinite possibilities of ICT technologies and working towards win-win outcomes in the AI era.