The rapid rise and evolution of AI has created a real opportunity – if not a necessity – across the data center industry to rethink facility infrastructure and build in a way that is both more efficient and more sustainable.
Power and cooling are often in the spotlight, and rightfully so, but the physical infrastructure required to connect increasing volumes of compute power is growing just as rapidly.
To help identify where efficiency and sustainability gains can be made at the connectivity layer, in its latest whitepaper, Corning examined two AI data hall configurations: one using traditional single core fiber and the other using its innovative multicore fiber solution.
The study used a cradle-to-gate, third party-reviewed lifecycle assessment to evaluate the passive optical infrastructure – including optical fiber, cables, housings, trays, ducts, and packaging within the data hall.
“We saw how multicore’s higher pathway density improves material efficiency, deployment speeds, and carbon footprints,” explains Carly Gaj, sustainability manager at Corning. “The results showed that multicore fiber enables up to a 60 percent reduction in embodied carbon per GPU for the passive optical components within the scope of our study.”
