The world over, sustainability has moved to the top of the agenda – not just in business, or data centres, but for everyone, everywhere.
The collective experience of doing whatever we can, in whatever way we can, to contribute to lowering emissions is uniting communities and populations.
As we look towards future development, sustainability cannot be just a consideration. It must be a deeply integrated principle.
The MENA region is experiencing a huge wave of demand, investment, and development of digital services.
According to a report from Arizton Advisory and Intelligence for the region, over the next five years, the data centre market will see an almost 10 percent compound annual growth rate, to reach a market investment of more than $6 billion through 2027.
Recent years have seen expansion and development of connectivity across the region, as well as accelerated digital transformation, which are also drivers. Regional business demand for colocation and cloud-based services has driven the construction of hyper-scale data centres by the likes of Teraco Data Environments, Africa Data Centres, stc, Khazna Data Centers, and MainOne.
A Knight Frank report for DC Bytes states that in the UAE, a built capacity of 65MW will be supplemented by 19MW under construction and a further 18MW planned, for a total of 102MW this year.
Arizton reports that Microsoft and Oracle both intend to make significant investments, while the Saudi Arabian government has also announced its digital infrastructure plan, which will include investments of $19.6 billion.
The region’s market has already adopted a modular data centre approach to speed up deployments, increase efficiency with approved designs and meet PUE standards.
However, to meet sustainability goals, more must be done. And it is heartening to see major efforts underway. For example, Middle East Energy Transition reports that in the first half of 2021, MENA saw $2.8 billion of renewable energy source (RES) project contracts awarded in the region. This rapid transition towards RES is exactly what is needed to power the next generation of digital infrastructure that will underpin economic development.
Data centre evolution
Data centre evolution and digital infrastructure evolution are closely intertwined. The data centre of the future will need to be sustainable, efficient, adaptive and resilient. The data centres being built will be compatible with future IT needs, ensuring that physical equipment, cooling, and power can accommodate advances in IT servers as well as the scale and nature of new workloads and storage demands.
Edge development
If building a thousand small edge data centres is being contemplated, distributed across different geographies, the need to maintain a level of efficiency is much higher. The reality is that the need for sustainability in edge environments is becoming the highest priority. And it is becoming a huge industry, of the order of $250 billion globally by 2024 (IDC).
City smarts
Perhaps the most complete expression of those ambitions is in smart cities. Bringing together the municipal, civil, commercial, and administrative needs of the entire population, smart cities can provide greener, leaner and more liveable environments for their inhabitants.
The region has seen pioneering initiatives ranging from Masdar City in Abu Dhabi in 2008, to the investment plan by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to achieve a trillion-dollar digital economy around smart cities by 2025. A rich, diverse, sustainable digital infrastructure will be a critical foundation for these ambitions.
Pankaj Sharma, Executive Vice President, Secure Power, Schneider Electric.
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