Data center CTO weighs in on AI demands, liquid cooling and telecom transparency

One of the challenges data center operators face is keeping up with the capacity their customers need while not wasting the investment they've already made in real estate, buildings and dark fiber.

John Sasser, CTO at Sabey Data Centers, one of the world's largest privately owned multi-tenant data center operators, joined us for a brief podcast at Data Center World to discuss his company's story and how they're handling increased capacity needs from AI and cloud computing. One of the game changers in this space is liquid cooling.

Sasser said the company's largest data centers are now designed for "around 50- to 60-megawatts of IT capacity," which is built as air-cooled with the flexibility to install liquid cooling. "We are working on designs of data centers that are north of 100 megawatts in the same footprint or even smaller footprint than some of these, you know, 50- to 60-megawatt buildings intended specifically for primarily liquid-cooled servers," Sasser said.

He also discussed the need for telecom operators to be more transparent about where fiber assets are available and how easy it is to connect to that bandwidth.