Digital Economy Weekly - July 28, 2024
IDCA - International Data Center Authority
The Authority that Enables Industry 5.0, Empowering Digital Transformation, Digital Economy, and Digital Infrastructure.
Story of the Week
The fat-fingered Crowdstrike/Microsoft update heard around the world continued to reverberate this past week, focusing attention on the danger of single-points-of-failure (SPF) within specific organizations and the world as a whole.
Yet technology always marches onward, with every day bringing new announcements of vast new data center complexes in every corner of – you guessed it, the entire world.?
Case in point: The unprepossessing university town of DeKalb, IL, located on the western outskirts of Chicagoland (and also the base of an IDCA researcher) has announced the plans for a major new data center complex to be built within the next several months. So far, the project is managed by Karis Acquisitions, which acts as a beard for major vendors. DeKalb has recently seen $1.5 billion in data center development from Meta, and local sources say the new big vendor is likely Microsoft or Google.
Add to that some bullet points:
To put the week's announcement in context, we can remember that the entire world consumes a steady state 2.9 terawatts (2,900 GW). So looking at a new 43GW footprint would consume 1.5 percent of that. Ambitious developers have told us that another 50GW or 100GW may in fact be put into place within the next few years.?
Famous U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen said decades ago about the federal budget, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.” His observation is quite relevant today as industry movers and shakers are talking about a gigawatt here, a gigawatt there, and massive numbers of gigawatts here and there. What's happening with your company, your backyard, your nation, and your region? Let us know, and thanks for reading.
Country Close-up: Kenya
The government of Kenyan President William Ruto includes an emphasis on developing digital infrastructure and a Digital Economy among its goals. The 57-year-old Ruto was elected the nation's leader in 2022, following almost 25 years of involvement in Kenyan politics.?
The nation's “mile high” capital city of Nairobi is naturally considered to be a prime area for development, as are the southern highlands in which it sits that extend down to Mount Kilimanjaro and its southern neighbor Tanzania's key city of Arusha, along with its major port of Mombasa in the nation's southeast.?
Kenya and Tanzania are in fact both focused to some degree on digital infrastructure, as they also anchor the regional, eight-nation trading block known as the East Africa Community (EAC), which has dreams of one day creating a single nation called the East African Federation.? Such a nation would have Swahili as a lingua franca? (along with English), would encompass an area similar to the continental US and a population to match the US as well.?
IDCA Research shows a long arduous road to the goal of creating a transformed economy, with some bright spots in the picture. Kenya's electricity grid, for example, is highly renewable, approaching 90%. Kenya's economic efficiency in producing emissions is also good, similar to that of the US. However, its digital infrastructure is lacking, which shows that Kenya's economic efficiency is due in large part to a relatively small economy overall.?
Kenya's per-person income is only about 20% of the world average, and substantially smaller than that when compared to the US and other developed nations. Even so, it is almost twice that of its fellow EAC members.?
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So there is a lot of economic and digital infrastructure work to be done. Kenya and the region's data center footprint requires less (often much less) than 1% of its electricity grid, compared to slightly more than 1% for the world and 2-3% of most developed countries.?
Indeed, data center development – the foundation of all digital infrastructures and digital economy dreams – shows the most disparity in the world's technology sphere. In fact, the disparity among nations approaches a factor of 100,000X. President Ruto seems to have his nation on the right path when it comes to building a Digital Economy, as does Tanzania's President Samia Sahan as well as Paul Kagame, the leader of smaller nation Rwanda's dynamic economy. Kenya and East Africa should be at or near the top of anyone's priority list when it comes to building data centers and other digital infrastructure. ?
Heard in the Aisle
“The human impact of AI is of course critical, but also manifests itself in a number of ways. Organizations absolutely cannot make consideration of people just a checkbox item, and must think through very deeply how AI will affect its people and the products and services they're creating.” – Waldo Waldman, panelist on “The Human Impact of AI” webinar.
Heard at Dinner
Talking this week to an engineer from ASML, the Dutch and US chipmaking hardware and software company that's been at the center of Biden Administration exhortations not to provide leading-edge stuff to China. He noted, “(the Chinese government) might try to reverse-engineer everything, but they're going to fall behind no matter what they do. I'm hoping the big powers can get this straightened out.”
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