Data Centre experts predict 6X increase in DCI bandwidth in 5 years
Summary
"AI workloads are reshaping the entire data centre landscape, from infrastructure builds to bandwidth demand," said Jürgen Hatheier, Chief Technology Officer, International, Ciena. AI is set to accelerate this growth significantly, meaning operators are rethinking their architectures and planning for how they can meet this demand sustainably.” Survey respondents confirm there is a growing opportunity for pluggable optics to support bandwidth demands and address power and space challenges. According to the survey, 98% of data centre experts believe pluggable optics are important for reducing power consumption and the physical footprint of their network infrastructure. According to the survey, 81% of respondents believe LLM training will take place over some level of distributed data centre facilities, which will require DCI solutions to be connected to each other. When asked about the key factors shaping where AI inference will be deployed, the respondents ranked the following priorities: • AI resource utilisation over time is the top priority (63%) • Reducing latency by placing inference compute closer to users at the edge (56%) Rather than deploying dark fibre, the majority (67%) of respondents expect to use Managed Optical Fiber Networks (MOFN), which utilise carrier-operated high-capacity networks for long-haul data centre connectivity.