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TECH FEATURE AI & SUBSEA CABLES parts of the virtualized cloud of storage. And this east-west FROM CONVENTIONAL CLOUD TO growth can happen over long distances. AI DATA CENTERS

To explain why, let’s look at the Facebook model, which The biggest question mark over AI data centers is what is driven by advertising revenue. As a U.K. resident, I effect AI processes such as training vs. inference will have on spend most of my money here, so if I travel to the U.S. or traffc patterns. The initial observations are that the move around Asia, there’s no point in serving me U.S. or Asia to AI data centers for training large neural network models ads – the Facebook data center in Singapore, for example, is boosting east-west growth because, for one thing, these has to synchronize with one of their three data centers in models are exceeding the scale that can easily be trained

Europe to retrieve the appropriate advertising and deliver inside using the capacity that can be rented at any one time it with low latency so I don’t scroll past it before it’s deliv- in a single data center. I’ve shown this speculative growth ered, because then Facebook would not get paid for my prediction with the shaded section in Figure 2.

“eyeballs.” East-west traffc also means that data centers Inference requires low latency, whereas training is re- can load-balance and act as resilient backup. garded as being less latency-sensitive for the simple reason

Figure 3: The operational and network-based impact of AI in SLTE technology 48 OFFSHORE ENGINEER OEDIGITAL.COM