The need for more cloud computing capacity and future AI applications has been steadily driving more data center investments. Those investments led to a steady demand for fiber capacity between data centers and more optical networking innovation inside data centers. Here's how Light Reading covered this trend in 2024.
In 2024, 5G may have plateaued, but the excitement around data center infrastructure grew considerably.
In October, Lumen CTO Dave Ward told Light Reading that a "fundamentally different order of magnitude" of compute power, graphics processing units (GPUs) and bandwidth is required to support AI workloads.
"It is the largest expansion of the Internet in our lifetime," Ward said.
Ward told Light Reading that Lumen is constructing 130,000 fiber route miles to support Meta and other customers seeking to interconnect AI-enabled data centers. According to our story by Kelsey Ziser, the fiber conduits in this buildout would contain anywhere from 144 to more than 500 fibers to connect multi-gigawatt data centers.
That's just one example. The need for more cloud computing capacity and future AI applications has been steadily driving more data center investments in 2024. Those investments led to a steady demand for fiber capacity between data centers and more optical networking innovation inside data centers.
On the Light Reading podcast, Corning's Brian Rhoney and Bob Whitman explained how fiber infrastructure and computing requirements in and across data centers need to change to support GenAI versus traditional cloud computing:
In Light Reading's coverage this year, we highlighted big telco and hyperscaler data center investments worldwide. Also, we covered the shifts in the optical networking landscape – the rise of coherent pluggable optics and new fiber innovations – that are helping connect server clusters as data centers change. Here are some of the stories, podcasts and interviews covering this topic in 2024:
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