The increasing energy and data demands of AI means that nearly half (44%) of all new UK data centres are predicted be dedicated for AI workloads over the coming five years as the global push for AI accelerates.

This is according to new data from Ciena, which found similar patterns across the globe, with the global average of new data centres expected to be dedicated to AI workloads is 43%.

The rapid growth of AI workloads is driving a major transformation in data center network infrastructure, with global data center experts anticipating a significant increase in interconnect bandwidth needs over the next five years.

The survey, conducted in partnership with Censuswide, queried more than 1,300 data center decision makers across 13 countries.

More than half (53%) of respondents believe AI workloads will place the biggest demand on data center interconnect (DCI) infrastructure over the next 2-3 years, surpassing cloud computing (51%) and big data analytics (44%).

With AI model training and inference requiring unprecedented data movement, data center experts predict a massive leap in bandwidth needs.

In addition, when asked about the needed performance of fiber optic capacity for DCI, 87% of participants believe they will need 800 Gb/s or higher per wavelength.

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“AI workloads are reshaping the entire data center landscape, from infrastructure builds to bandwidth demand,”said Jürgen Hatheier, chief technology officer, International, Ciena.

“Historically, network traffic has grown at a rate of 20-30% per year. AI is set to accelerate this growth significantly, meaning operators are rethinking their architectures and planning for how they can meet this demand sustainably.”

The survey also fond that, as requirements for AI compute continue to increase the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) will become more distributed across different AI data centres.

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 AI resource utilisation over time as the top priority (63%), followed by reducing latency (56%), data sovereignty requirements (54%), and strategic locations for key customers (54%).