Hong Kong Gets a Liquid-Cool Supercomputing Upgrade
- By CDOTrends editors
- April 22, 2024
Hong Kong just cranked up the speed of its bid to be the region's AI and FinTech powerhouse. NTT Com Asia’s new High-Performance Computing (HPC) as-a-Service solution means streamlined, lightning-fast deployment of the kind of high-density data centers hungry AI models drool over.
This isn't just another data center. NTT teamed up with Dell Technologies for this one, bringing in cutting-edge direct liquid cooling (DLC) tech and Dell's monster computing power. It's a whole package deal: co-location, infrastructure, servers, the whole nine yards—and all on a flexible pay-as-you-go model. Want a 50 kW HPC beast set up? Done.
Enabling AI uptake
AI is eating the world, and it's hungry for horsepower. Traditional IT? It’s not cutting it.
“We are seeing a rapid take-up of AI and emerging technologies at scale across businesses in Hong Kong and Asia, which poses new challenges to traditional IT infrastructure,” says Alex Chan, NTT Com Asia’s vice president of enterprise and digital solutions.
“Alongside Dell Technologies, we’re offering enterprise customers a turnkey solution that allows them to scale up their IT infrastructure quickly and cost-efficiently with end-to-end deployment to ease operational hassle,” he added.
This move comes as no surprise. Think about those mind-blowing generative AI tools everyone's buzzing about—they're gobbling up processing power like there's no tomorrow. Reports suggest the demand for data centers in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia could skyrocket by 25% every year for the next while.
But all that power comes with a heat problem. Liquid cooling is where it's at for keeping those supercomputers from turning into saunas.
Dell's tech is all about efficiency. "We deliver energy-efficient infrastructure to help customers enhance server performance and cooling capabilities in data centers," said Dell Technologies' general manager Jackie Kwong.
The bottom line
This NTT-Dell collab could be a game-changer for AI-driven businesses in Hong Kong and beyond. It's a sign that the infrastructure scramble to keep up with the AI revolution is well and truly on.
"The collaboration makes NTT data center in Hong Kong an ideal location to support the demanding processor-intensive deployments that are fast becoming vital to the transformation of modern enterprises in the AI era," said Steven So, NTT Com Asia’s senior vice president of data center hong kong.
Will this be the push that truly elevates Hong Kong as an innovation hub? Time will tell, but one thing's for sure—things are about to get a whole lot faster and way cooler.
Image credit: iStockphoto/Andrey Suslov