businesschief.com 131LANDMARK DIVIDEND
DID YOU KNOW...
MARKING THE TRENDS
“5G capabilities will bring new
technologies that you and I don't
even know that we need to have today,”
reasons Hammerli. “And if we talked again
in five years, we would say, ‘How did we
ever do without it?’ These new technologies
will need not only the 5G connectivity, but
also the data centers behind it to handle,
manipulate and store the data. I believe that
this will drive the rise of edge computing,
which in turn will drive data center
growth overall.”Hammerli believes there’s more need for
data center space at the edge... “There are
two separate trends going on at the same
time. One is clearly the edge and building
comparatively small data centers in many
locations, in every city. Yet, at the same
time, we're seeing the opposite trend,
where hyperscalers are building massively
large, highly efficient data centers that are
not only driving down the cost of compute,
but also driving the efficiency of the data
centers themselves, and making themgreener. So, fewer data centers, but much,
much larger in size. Those are the data
centers located on a campus that may offer
100 megawatts of power, for example,
versus an edge data center, which may
offer less than a megawatt, in terms of
power only.”Hammerli also expects the colocation
space to grow in between. “All of these
different pieces need to be connected
together, from the low latency that needs
to be right where the end user is located, to
the assistance in things like self-driving cars,
all the way to the data that's on the largest
scale that needs to be manipulated,” he
notes. “Overall, I expect the space to grow.
Over the last four years a massive amount
of capital has expressed interest in investing
in this space. Four years ago, investing in
data centers was considered an alternative
asset class. Today, we're starting to work our
way out of that definition and more into a
core food group where the largest investors
all now have an allocation.”