Latest / Technology Now / Why are countries investing in giant data centres?

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Why are countries investing in giant data centres? · Technology Now

• MICHAEL BIRD Good morning, Sam. SAM JARRELL good morning or good afternoon, Michael MICHAEL BIRD Nice and simple question for you today. It's really lighthearted. If you want to set up the data infrastructure for a country, SAM JARRELL Very simple question. you know what? I would start with the experts at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and get their thoughts on how I should go about this totally easy and simple task. MICHAEL BIRD Well, I would, I think I would start with, what's the need? What's the requirement? hat's where I would start. but anyway, Today we are chatting to somebody who is currently trying to build an enormous data center, which is designed to work across not just countries. But multiple continents. How cool is that? SAM JARRELL It is ice cold, MICHAEL BIRD very cool. Then. I'm Michael Bird SAM JARRELL I'm Sam Jarrell MICHAEL BIRD And welcome to Technology Now from HPE. MICHAEL BIRD So Sam, there are over 10,000 data centers around the world, and of those 45% of them are based in the US alone, According to research carried out by Cargoson. SAM JARRELL Wow, that is a lot of them. But how does the number of data centers relate to their size? MICHAEL BIRD Well, that is the big question. particularly in 2026, right? The biggest data center in the world is designed to hold over one. Million servers, which is a staggering quantity of not just information, but of course staggering compute power. And we will of course, link to all of these stats in the show notes. SAM JARRELL And would you say it's reasonable to say that data centers are driving the current industrial revolution? MICHAEL BIRD I think it would be very fair to say that, Sam, I think, uh, this boom that we're seeing in the world of AI would not be possible where not for data centers. Now to talk more about how different countries are harnessing the power of data centers and ai, I chatted to Talal al Kaissi, the interim CEO of the company Core 42. SAM JARRELL But before we talk to Talal, I want to take a look back at the humbler origins of the modern day data centre. It’s time for… Technology Then. SAM JARRELL Okay, Michael, it's my turn to ask you something. Do you know when the first data center was built and for bonus points, where was it created? MICHAEL BIRD Okay. Uh, somewhere in East coast in the US in the 1968. Okay. What's the answer? SAM JARRELL Fair guesses. Fair guesses. We’re throwing it all the way back to Pennsylvania in the mid 1940s and the completion of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer – ENIAC for short. ENIAC used just 150 kilowatts of electricity to run almost 18,000 vacuum tubes and 6,000 switches and its external memory was, of course, punched cards. But where do you put this behemoth? Well, it needs an entire room to house it – a full eighteen hundred square feet of space (that’s about 167 square meters for you, Michael). MICHAEL BIRD Huh? that uses as much electricity as my car can use to charge itself at one of those rapid charges? That's not a lot of electricity for quite a large space. SAM JARRELL It just goes to show how far we've come, right? And while the EAC is generally recognized as the world's first data center, it would've looked hugely different to the ones we know today. EAC and its direct descendants were so big that the root server room only held servers for a single system along with the specialized power and cooling systems, which needed to go with it. They were big and expensive and not accessible to anyone outside of universities, governments, or a few large corporations. In fact, it would take another 40 years or so for the general purpose data centers to come onto the scene. With the advent of microchips and the increased in density of processing power, these original data centers transformed from glorified server rooms into vital infrastructure. As demand exploded, the internet erupted onto the scene, and cloud computing was then adopted. Today, the world's biggest data center by physical size is in China. It requires 150 megawatts of power. That's a thousand times of what the Eniac needed, and it's 10.7 million square feet. It’s really quite remarkable. MICHAEL BIRD It's absolutely mind boggling, and I think it's gonna get more impressive when we hear from our guests for this week. Talal Al Kaissi is the interim CEO of Core 42, who are in the process of creating a five gigawatt data center. But before we talked about the data center, I wanted to know exactly how he got to where he is today. TALAL AL KAISSI So on my day job, I focus on the digital infrastructure business. I'm the interim CEO at Core 42. And my night job, which has been really the brunt of my, focus for the past two years. It's, on the group lever. I work on global affairs. Try to help with everything, from, getting our industry partners aligned, figuring out the advocacy engine that we need to have on government levels across the world, particularly in the US because of our US partners and because this is such a consequential technology. So in my nine years at the UAE embassy in Washington. I understood how that mechanism works to be able to inspire confidence in deploying this type of infrastructure that's so consequential that can have the security envelope required. So getting the export licenses for these types of chips that are, material, especially when you have five gigawatt cluster that you need to fill is something that was, predominantly the use of my last two years in terms of travel and air miles. MICHAEL BIRD Okay. So, can you tell us who G 42 is, where G 42 came from? Just gimme the story. TALAL AL KAISSI Yeah, so I mean, G42 essentially is a collection of technology companies and we, touch on a significant portion of the AI value chain. Everything from the physical infrastructure. the cloud environments we have, be it the private cloud that's disconnected for, the requirement of high auto key and sovereignty in terms of, being disconnected. Then you have what we call the sovereign public cloud. to have the majority of public sector and regulated industries be able to consume public cloud, but also have a sovereign, control envelope that, ensures that. They protect the imperative of data and then the AI cloud, and that's something we're working on with HPE and others, as well in deploying the AI infrastructure that's, used to underpin what we refer to as the intelligence grid. Yeah. A global network of interconnected AI data centers that can help underpin the enablement of AI native societies. And then you have operating businesses in healthcare and space pre-site, big data analytics and business intelligence, analogue on robotics, CPX and cybersecurity and inception, that's doing a lot of applied AI research. MICHAEL BIRD does G 42 tie into the UAE's vision for ai? and how does that compare to, say, the US or the way that the eu, approach it? TALAL AL KAISSI it very much ties into it. I think we are the, provider of AI solutions and infrastructure that help underpin what we call AI native societies. And if you look at some of the things that have been, announced recently in the UAE and Abu Dhabi in particular, there's An objective by 2027 by the Crown Prince to make it the first AI native government globally. And so we're, you know, really leaning in hard on that. So I think we're a key part of that enablement to ensure that we can plug into intelligence the same way you plug into electricity and, and gain it as a utility. MICHAEL BIRD So, as part of the UAE'S $1.4 trillion investment, In the us I believe there are plans for a five gigawatt data center. Can you just tell us a bit more about that? TALAL AL KAISSI Yeah, sure. So, when President Trump visited in May of 2025, we announced the establishment of a joint project with our US partners, that's gonna have five gigawatts of energy that's dedicated to the manufacturing of intelligence. And this is something that's, quite unheard of. And, you have to have not just. The political will and the economic wherewithal to do something like that. But it all comes down to energy as well. And that's where we've seen, even in our deployments in Europe and in the us, that's been the critical bottleneck in my view. and the limiting factor. So when you have six gigawatts of energy that are, currently online, then you have the ability to, and the responsibility really to begin to not manufacture intelligence just for domestic consumption. In, in, in the UAE we're only a country of 10 million. Mm-hmm. So the quadrillions of tokens are gonna be produced. A lot of that's gonna be exportable. So we become this real interesting inferencing supernode for the big hyperscalers and model developers to use for the propagation and responsible way of intelligence. To roughly half the world's population in a 3,200 kilometer radius, sub 60 milliseconds with high bandwidth, connectivity and low latency. So that's where we feel the responsibility to do that. Now, the 1.4 trillion is obviously investments into the US over a period of 10 years, and that's where we're doubling and tripling down on our, investment in not just digital infrastructure, but it goes across the board across multiple different industries as well. MICHAEL BIRD And so the five gigawatt data center will be located in the uae? TALAL AL KAISSI Yeah, it's in Abu Dhabi. it's gonna be not just the AI data centers, but it is gonna have, it's gonna be an ecosystem. There'll be joint, research and development. There'll be other types of facilities, even sub-assembly So it's, broader than just the AI data center component, but it's massive. We're talking 10 square miles. Wow. it's quite a sizable commitment by not just the government, but the companies that are involved. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, I wanna ask you about that in a second, but before I do, what, what is G 40 two's role in this project? TALAL AL KAISSI so in that value chain that I mentioned, there are a couple of components that are quite critical to that type of a build out, obviously the physical infrastructure in the data centers. Then you have in many occasions, core 42. Being the, operator and partner of choice to some of the model developers so that we could deploy the infrastructure. We buy the GPUs like we're doing with HPE right now for the first batch, and operate that on behalf of either our AI cloud or others AI cloud. And then up the stack, obviously, in terms of us developing our own specialized language models, we have universities that are doing reasoning models, biology models. World models and all these things, are gonna become part of what we're able to enable. MICHAEL BIRD Okay. So how on earth do you build a five gigawatt AI campus? I mean, where do you even start? TALAL AL KAISSI So the AI data center component of it is, interesting if you look at it as layers of a cake, right? you've got the connectivity infrastructure, then you've got the, data center, shell and core. Then you've got the chips, you've got the liquid cooling, the network fabric inside. and if you. Add all that together. on a per gigawatt level, about a $50 billion CapEx. Uh, predominantly today, in today's world, uh, 70 to 80% of that are the chips. but that will continue to, go down and will eventually converge with the price of electricity. But if you think of what's needed globally to diffuse AI in a way that will provide equitable access to intelligence globally, you need at least. Anywhere between 300 and 500 gigawatts of AI data center in different locations across the world. And so we are also from a capital standpoint, pooling and convening capital allocators and others to help with the capital deployment for this global AI infrastructure build out. MICHAEL BIRD energy capacity is always a, big issue when it comes to AI data centers. how do you see this campus being power? TALAL AL KAISSI So the good thing about what we have today on the grid is, a significant percentage is already, powered by nuclear. So we've got the four reactors that we've built over the past 10 years that are online today and then there's also solar. we do have one of the largest solar facilities photovoltaic that is gonna have around the clock. Base load of 1.2 gigawatts of energy. Wow. When you couple it with battery storage, it's about five gigawatts of photovoltaic and 19 gigawatt hours of battery. So that's a very unique situation. So the whole five gigawatt campus will be powered by energy that we're bringing in from the grid. MICHAEL BIRD So G 42 has an ambition to build an intelligence grid relying on a network of AI ready data centers. Can you just sort of describe what that practically looks like and who do you see using it? TALAL AL KAISSI you need to have these different, nodes in different parts of the world to ensure that there's low latency, high bandwidth connectivity that these nodes can serve and so that's the concept of a grid. But what more, what's more important is if you think back to electricity, today we have. 770 million people without access to electricity We cannot afford the same thing to happen with intelligence. And we really, very much view intelligence in a way that's analogous to electricity that people should be able to plug in and access intelligence as a utility. And to be able to do that effectively and, and really not have a digital divide with all the potential socioeconomic ramifications that would have. between the global north and the global south, you need to be able to situate that grid in a way that can serve places that are not gonna have the ability where it's too prohibitive to build out data centers. And that's where we've come up with also the concept that we announced, which is a digital embassy concept. Where we can through G two G agreements, create the political air cover and, government to government commitments, in terms of preserving sovereignty and serving some of these countries out of the UAE. You don't need a substation analogy. in data centers in every country, you can actually serve these things remotely and avoid that digital divide So that's kind of why the intelligence grid is important. MICHAEL BIRD so the concept is they don't have to build out their own data centers in their own countries. Actually, the data center in Abu Dhabi, you can sort of isolate part of that and say, this is part of their sovereign nations. Yes. TALAL AL KAISSI Or provide them a virtual sovereign service with the right sovereign controls, technical and policy based that could provide them a similar service to what we provide to our government in the UAE. Yeah. So what we've tried and tested in the UAE that's been, compliant from a regulatory standpoint, we can then convey in a way with the same tool set. MICHAEL BIRD so sovereignty is probably something you think about, talk about quite a lot. TALAL AL KAISSI sovereignty is a very nuanced term. it's more than just data residency that people care about how you protect the data from extraterritorial, uh, jurisdictional control that countries can bestow on, companies that come from those countries. That's where I think we have to get creative on the technical and policy level because it wouldn't be convenient to have your, genomics data. Just sitting unchecked on a public cloud susceptible to that. And so we've built in designed tools to create those trusted compute environments and to enable the public sector and regulated industries to benefit from the value of the, deployments that we have. MICHAEL BIRD And, and so what does, I mean from your perspective, what does sovereignty mean to you when you think about it? TALAL AL KAISSI It, it means a level of control. And every country wants to have a certain level of control at the very basic level of the data that they're providing, especially if it's, sensitive data. Yeah. So there are different classifications of data. Top secret data definitely requires an airgapped disconnected cloud setting and you have that, but you wanna minimize that footprint because it's inherently, limited and it's not as feature rich or customizable or scalable, even by definition, to what public clouds can provide. But a public cloud is the other extreme where it's completely unchecked, so you find the sweet spot in between. Through these technical and, policy controls to enable the use of that feature rich environment in a compliant way so that regulators and customers in, financial services, healthcare, and energy can benefit from that type of an infrastructure MICHAEL BIRD so what you're saying is that it's not like, here you go, here's a sore cloud. It's like, okay, well what actually you using it for? If you it's healthcare data, then you probably need this. TALAL AL KAISSI and there's trade offs, right? in certain situations, you want multiple layers of sovereignty, right? You want operational sovereignty where you have your own people that are operating the environment. You want financial sovereignty, nobody else is paying for it. So you're not subject to, someone cutting something off, right? Mm-hmm. And, depending on the use case, depending on the workload, you need to have a more versatile approach and offering that allows. To mix and match, depending on the imperatives that a country has or a sector or a company or an enterprise has around data to ensure their compliance and ensure also IP protection. MICHAEL BIRD Talal, it's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining us in technology now. Really appreciate our time. TALAL AL KAISSI My pleasure. SAM JARRELL Oh goodness. Well, I still can't get over the number. He tossed out, five gigawatts of AI data center capacity. a single space in Abu Dhabi. MICHAEL BIRD and 10 square miles as well. That's just, that's massive, isn't it? what I found interesting was how they're powering it I love a chat about PV and batteries. So he said 1.2 gigawatts of PV. and he basically said that they have, battery capacity, SAM JARRELL but I thought, you know, part of it, the way he broke it down was kind of interesting, like. If you look at like a GA gigawatt of an AI data center, you're talking about roughly, he said 50 billion of CapEx. and so right now about 70 to 80% of that is the chips. and then over time that starts to converge with the cost of electricity. But if you also have those like nuclear reactors powering things, like are you able to still then further cut the cost? MICHAEL BIRD I think the economics are sort of slightly mind blowing. He talked about he intelligence grid, and how, intelligence should be a utility, We live in a world where. If you have access to the internet, then you have access to lots of websites. You sort of have access to information, and actually we wanna democratize that. SAM JARRELL He mentioned like 770 million people don't have access to electricity. So I feel like in order to even have access to the intelligence, we'll have to bridge that divide at some point, MICHAEL BIRD So I think you talked about serving countries remotely and then building this sort of, virtual sovereign controls. So I think I likened it in the interview to partitioning off part of that data center but I like when I asked him about sovereignty, he gave the same answer to an interview that we did, where he basically said. Okay, what do you actually mean by sovereignty? And he talked about, you know, there are loads of different things you could think about, operational sovereignty, where you have your own people and financial sovereignty, which I thought was really interesting, SAM JARRELL Yeah, when we've been talking to more technical folks it tends to go back, to the sense of control. and I,think that this opens up a very interesting discussion around like whether or not governments will still be comfortable renting essentially sovereign, AI capable infrastructure. It sounds like a great concept. I just wonder if they will still be reticent since the data wouldn't physically live where they are MICHAEL BIRD what he sort of alluded to was the fact that it's not your data is either sovereign or not. there is a spectrum, you couldn't have everything air gapped, you know, for example, information that your citizens want to access about, I dunno, car registration details. If that's air gapped and super secure, then that's gonna be really hard to access. So, but equally, you don't want everything on the public cloud because that's the other extreme, you could maybe see, a scenario where a nation would say, well, this information, whilst it's. It's important information. Actually. We are happy to put that in that sort environment. Yeah, it, it all comes down to trust, right? If people don't trust how their data is handled, none of this, no matter how big or powerful the data center is, will deliver on the impact. MICHAEL BIRD Now, Sam, I dunno if you remember last, last summer, HPE went through a rebrand? Um, now, yes. Now because brands and names are important, I wanted to know where Core 42 got their name. Can you guess what it actually means? It's a pretty nerdy answer SAM JARRELL I'm gonna, I'm gonna guess it has something to do with like ports on, like something in a data center, right MICHAEL BIRD No, not that, not that, not like, uh, I, I, I don't wanna give it too much away. Okay. Let, let, let's let Talal give the answer. TALAL AL KAISSI The 42 actually, uh, comes from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Oh. As the answer to life, the universe and MICHAEL BIRD everything. Got it. Got it. TALAL AL KAISSI where we draw our inspiration. Not many people know that. Some people thought it was 42 companies. That was, that's what actually got me sold into getting into GG 42. I had left the embassy at that time and I was in the space industry. Um, we were working on Mars Mission, um, and uh, at that point I met with our group, CEO Pang, and he mentioned, two things. One was the 42, the other was that we are having ai, Augment human ingenuity to solve the biggest problems that we have on earth all the way inner space, molecular level, like the genomics program we have all the way to outer space, which is measured in 10 to the power of 12 and light years and answer life's biggest questions. MICHAEL BIRD So 42 matches pretty well actually. TALAL AL KAISSI Indeed it does. SAM JARRELL Okay that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you to our guest, Talal Al Kaissi And of course, to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. MICHAEL BIRD If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to episodes and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now AT hpe.com and don’t forget to subscribe so you can listen first every week. Technology Now is hosted by Sam Jarrell and myself, Michael Bird This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Izzie Clarke with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Beckie Bird, Alissa Mitry, and Janessa Ayache. Our theme music was composed by Greg Hooper. SAM JARRELL Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers! SAM JARRELL Bye y’all