Intel, AMD Talk Up Biggest AI Challenges, Benefits at Data Center World
AI challenges include data center power and cooling, software accuracy and privacy, and trying to keep up with rapid massive changes caused by the technology.
![AI challenges discussed at Data Center World 2024 AI challenges discussed at Data Center World 2024](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt4c2b8fa1294324ac/661ebb4e74821bcdc926caa6/Data_Center_World_Keynote_Day_2.jpg?width=1280&auto=webp&quality=95&format=jpg&disable=upscale)
DATA CENTER WORLD — Like most IT conferences these days, Data Center World 2024 is focused on changes brought about by artificial intelligence (AI). Besides talking up AI’s benefits, the data center conference is looking at AI challenges such as the increase in power and space consumption. Speakers at the Washington, D.C., event are exploring ways to overcome these challenges. (Data Center World is run by Informa Tech, Channel Futures' parent company.)
Representatives from Intel and AMD – chip makers that seek to challenge Nvidia’s dominant position in GPUs that power AI – spoke about AI’s impact on the entire IT ecosystem during a Data Center World keynote session. As with other speakers at the show, they agreed that AI is here to stay and must be addressed. But it’s not just the hardware that needs to accelerate to keep up with performance and sustainability.
Jen Huffstetler, chief product sustainability officer of Intel, said three keys to achieving sustainability with AI include optimizing AI models and software as well as the system architectures. Liquid cooling and denser systems play a role, but there are other ways to improve data center efficiencies to overcome AI challenges.
“Innovation needs to keep happening on the hardware,” Huffstetler said. “But the software side, I think it's the biggest lever you've got. When the software is not tightly coupled with that hardware, if it's not utilizing everything that's inside that chip, you're not getting the benefit out of it.”
Laura Smith, corporate vice president of engineering solutions and AMD fellow, stressed an open ecosystem of hardware and software that will provide organizations with the flexibility to ride current and future AI waves.
“When that next ChatGPT comes in, it is probably going to be very different,” Smith said. “So, the next time there’s a big breakthrough and somebody has a really fantastic idea, am I going to be able to adopt it? That’s one reason at AMD that we believe strongly in an open ecosystem and partnerships, both on the hardware attributes and products that form a data center, but also in how we feel about software stack.”
Huffstetler and Smith emphasized the importance of data as well when implementing AI, particularly generative AI. Data accuracy and privacy are other key AI challenges for IT professionals.
“A lot of enterprises feel like whoever solves how to actually access and leverage the data they have, will have an advantage,” Smith said.
IT Professionals Under Pressure from AI
Smith said making AI sustainable requires data center modernization.
“What we’re seeing is IT professionals are under a lot of pressure,” she said. “There's this urgency to figure out AI, this push to quickly adopt AI. But when you turn it over to the IT professionals, it creates a lot of adjacent problems for them to solve. Where are they going to find the data center space? Where are they going to find the power? How are they going to fund the project? And we're seeing a big push to modernize existing data centers because as infrastructures age, they become a little more hands-on to manage, and the performance degrades over time.