For most of the last decade the data center was, in essence, a cloud machine. The facilities built through 2023 and 2024 were designed to run the applications we now take for granted, from email and collaboration tools to streaming and enterprise software. Then, almost overnight, artificial intelligence changed the brief. Once large language models proved how powerful they could be, investment poured into a new class of facility built specifically for AI, and these sites bear little resemblance to what came before.
The difference is not incremental. An AI data center consumes in the region of ten times the fiber of a comparable cloud facility. Where a cloud campus might be measured in tens of megawatts, the AI sites now being planned are measured in hundreds of megawatts. A national AI data center build program will require tens of millions of fiber kilometres. Multiply that across a national build program and the figures quickly become difficult to picture.
That trajectory raises an awkward question for anyone specifying infrastructure now. If demand is climbing this steeply, is there any point installing fiber today that will simply be redundant by the time the next generation of hardware arrives?
