LANDMARK DIVIDEND
MARKING THE TRENDS
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“ 5G capabilities will bring new technologies that you and I don ' t even know that we need to have today ,” reasons Hammerli . “ And if we talked again in five years , we would say , ‘ How did we ever do without it ?’ These new technologies will need not only the 5G connectivity , but also the data centers behind it to handle , manipulate and store the data . I believe that this will drive the rise of edge computing , which in turn will drive data center growth overall .”
Hammerli believes there ’ s more need for data center space at the edge … “ There are two separate trends going on at the same time . One is clearly the edge and building comparatively small data centers in many locations , in every city . Yet , at the same time , we ' re seeing the opposite trend , where hyperscalers are building massively large , highly efficient data centers that are not only driving down the cost of compute , but also driving the efficiency of the data centers themselves , and making them
greener . So , fewer data centers , but much , much larger in size . Those are the data centers located on a campus that may offer 100 megawatts of power , for example , versus an edge data center , which may offer less than a megawatt , in terms of power only .”
Hammerli also expects the colocation space to grow in between . “ All of these different pieces need to be connected together , from the low latency that needs to be right where the end user is located , to the assistance in things like self-driving cars , all the way to the data that ' s on the largest scale that needs to be manipulated ,” he notes . “ Overall , I expect the space to grow . Over the last four years a massive amount of capital has expressed interest in investing in this space . Four years ago , investing in data centers was considered an alternative asset class . Today , we ' re starting to work our way out of that definition and more into a core food group where the largest investors all now have an allocation .”
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