The data centre industry has become “obsessed with bragawatts” and the race to build bigger AI campuses, according to Pulsant CEO Rob Coupland.
But while these developments grab the headlines, Coupland believes some of the biggest changes are happening elsewhere.
Speaking to Mobile Europe, he says businesses across traditional UK industries are increasingly adopting digital technology, creating demand for infrastructure closer to where they operate.
“Real businesses doing real things, without fanfare, are driving transformation, including in traditional segments of the UK economy. These workloads will increasingly demand connectivity, resilience, sovereignty and proximity to users and data,” he says.
How does the UK data centre market compare to the rest of Europe?
The UK remains one of the most “mature and dynamic” digital infrastructure markets, Coupland believes.
“We’ve consistently been strong in innovation, connectivity, financial services, technology adoption and creating environments that support digital growth,” he explains. “Like many European markets, we’re facing increasing pressure around power availability, planning processes and the pace at which new infrastructure can be developed.”
However, these challenges are not exclusive to the UK but they are becoming more vital as demand for AI and high-density workloads grow.
“Where the UK has a particularly compelling opportunity is in leveraging its strong regional economies,” he says.
“The future won’t be defined solely by a handful of massive campuses. There is also significant demand for distributed, sovereign infrastructure that supports organisations across the whole country. That’s an area where the UK is well positioned to lead.”
The ‘increasingly important’ reason to expand outside of major UK cities
“The UK economy isn’t concentrated solely in London and neither should digital infrastructure be,” Coupland explains. “As applications become more data-intensive and more interactive, businesses need infrastructure closer to users, applications and data sources to deliver the performance and user experience they expect.”
Major regional business hubs such as Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester and Birmingham are generating significant digital demand in their own right.
For Coupland, bringing digital infrastructure closer to the regions it serves is becoming increasingly important.
“It improves performance, strengthens UK resilience and gives organisations greater confidence about where critical data and applications reside,” he says.
Organisations increasingly want infrastructure that reflects where their operations, clients and people are actually located.
“This becomes even more relevant in the context of AI. If the industry is correct about the scale of future inference workloads, then a significant proportion of AI processing will need to happen much closer to users, applications and enterprise data than many people assume today,” he notes.
The impact of AI on customer demand
More companies are moving from experimentation to real-world deployment and asking how AI can deliver measurable business value. He notes a lot of today’s discussion is dominated by AI training, due to the infrastructure requirements being “enormous and the numbers make headlines”.
However, Pulsant believes the longer-term opportunity lies in inference, where AI models are embedded into everyday business processes, operational systems and client-facing applications.
“Those workloads often have very different requirements. They need access to enterprise data, resilient connectivity and low latency, and in many cases they need to operate closer to users and data sources. That doesn’t necessarily need hyperscale infrastructure. More often it requires resilient infrastructure distributed across regional locations,” he explains.
“We’re also seeing AI reinforce concerns around data sovereignty and governance. Organisations increasingly want to understand where their data is stored, how it’s processed and who has control of it, particularly in regulated sectors.”
The biggest opportunities for telcos and infra providers to collaborate
Coupland believes the biggest opportunity lies in helping clients build more distributed digital architectures.
“Businesses increasingly need seamless connectivity between locations, cloud platforms, data centres and edge environments. Delivering that requires strong collaboration between telecoms operators and infrastructure providers,” he explains.
“As AI, automation and data-intensive applications grow, those partnerships will become even more important because clients are looking for integrated outcomes rather than individual technology components,” he notes.
As a result, he claims the real winners will be the organisations that combine connectivity, infrastructure and services in a way that simplifies deployment and delivers real business value.
Can the UK really compete with the Nordics for data centre investment?
According to Coupland, the Nordics have a clear advantage for certain types of large-scale deployments, especially where low-cost-renewable power is a primary consideration.
“However, infrastructure decisions are rarely based on a single factor. For many organisations, proximity to clients, access to skills, connectivity, data sovereignty, regulatory requirements and integration with existing operations are equally important considerations”, he explains.
He notes the UK benefits from a large and sophisticated digital economy, strong connectivity and a concentration of businesses that require “secure, resilient infrastructure close to where they operate”.
“Those strengths make it an attractive destination for the next phase of AI-enabled infrastructure growth, not just the first phase,” he says.
For Coupland, who has been CEO of Pulsant since 2019, it is not really a question of competing on exactly the same, instead different markets serve different requirements.
“The UK remains a highly attractive location for a broad range of digital infrastructure investment,” he says. “The future of AI won’t just be about building bigger infrastructure. It will be about deploying the right infrastructure in the right places.”
He concludes: “If the UK continues investing in those foundations and exploiting existing capabilities, alongside the headline-grabbing developments, then I think we’re very well positioned for the long term.”
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