“Asteo Conecta” Session at the XVII Aotec Fair. ZTE Presentation

 

Decentralizing the Future

 

Mariano Almagro, Sales Director at ZTE, shared during the “Asteo Conecta” sessions, held at the Asteo booth at the XVII Aotec Fair, the vision of this company specializing in telecommunications equipment and network solutions, regarding the data center market and the factors that could represent an interesting opportunity for rural areas to be chosen for their deployment, once they have the necessary connectivity infrastructure.

Rural environments could host different types of data centers in the near future and gain importance as an alternative to urban centers, provided they meet a series of conditions.

 

 

Mariano Almagro highlighted the growing demand for data centers, partly due to the advancement of artificial intelligence and the need for greater data storage and processing capacities, forecasting that Europe will double the number of data centers in the coming years.

In this context, rural environments offer an underexplored territory: They leverage advantages such as the availability of inexpensive industrial land, proximity to energy production centers (both hydroelectric and renewable), plus the existence of optical connectivity. “We believe these areas can become a very suitable choice for their installation.”

“We are at the beginning of the artificial intelligence era, and we are deploying the necessary platforms for it, which require tremendous storage and processing capabilities,” Almagro noted during the presentation.

“Spain has a series of characteristics that are ideal for becoming a data center powerhouse. We have the most extensive fiber optic infrastructure in Europe, we are a landing point for submarine cables, we have availability of very competitively priced industrial land, we have possibilities for renewable energy to be produced in sufficient quantity to achieve carbon neutrality, all of which makes our country an ideal place for the installation of these data centers,” Almagro stated.

Data Centers Beyond Madrid and Barcelona

However, the concentration of data centers in Madrid, which hosts half of these centers in Spain, and Barcelona remains a challenge. Almagro advocated for decentralizing this infrastructure, taking advantage of opportunities in other Spanish regions. He pointed out that the cost of industrial land and the availability of renewable energy are key factors in choosing their location.

“Why don’t we move these data centers outside of large urban centers? It is true that there is a latency requirement, but only for some services that would remain in data centers close to the end-user,” Almagro explained.

Almagro also addressed the need for qualified technical personnel to manage these data centers, proposing solutions such as local training and teleworking. Furthermore, he highlighted the case of China, which has implemented an ambitious data center distribution plan to balance regional development between east and west to avoid energy transport and develop the country’s more depressed western areas.

In 2022, China announced its plan called “Eastern Data, Western Computing”, which is currently underway. Today, 80% of its data centers are located in areas with high population concentration, in the east. The plan aims to build 8 computing hubs, 5 of which will be installed in the west, while services requiring low latency will remain in the 3 hubs to be installed in the east, near Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong. Services that do not require such low latency are moved westward.

What are the advantages of locating a data center in a rural area?

In this regard, and according to the presentation by Mariano Almagro, the strengths of rural areas as data center locations are: availability of industrial land (rural areas often offer industrial land at a lower cost, facilitating the installation of large-scale data centers); proximity to energy production centers; fiber optic connectivity: “Despite being far from urban centers, rural areas can have a fiber optic infrastructure like the one developed by Asteo, which allows for reliable and high-speed connectivity.”

Furthermore, locating data centers in rural areas contributes to decentralizing technological infrastructure and economically developing these areas.

ZTE Solutions

Given future prospects, Almagro mentioned some of the solutions developed by ZTE, such as servers with high-density graphics processing cards, all-flash memory servers, internal communication solutions between servers of up to 800 Gbps, as well as the use of liquid coolant like Ice Cube with in-rack coolant to reduce energy consumption in data center cooling.