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“SO JUST AS RAILROADS SUPPORTED INDUSTRIALIZATION AND SEAWAYS SUPPORTED GLOBALIZATION, THE DATA CENTRE SUPPORTS DIGITIZATION – A TREND NO LESS GLOBALLY IMPACTFUL”We are in a new era. The Digital Age, marked by the digital connection of people, institutions, and even things. This new era will be as transformative for the world as the Industrial Age was, and we have a unique opportunity, now, to ensure that transformation is wholly positive. From connected homes, to precision oil and gas exploration, to integrated healthcare, to smart farming, and so much more, enterprises and governments are stretching their boundaries in search of new opportunity. Individuals and institutions are fundamentally rewiring their relationships with each other. Individuals are increasingly empowered and expect all digital organizations to perform as well as the best digital organizations. Institutions are unleashing technology’s power to create not only new platforms and services, but also to develop the new business models and strategies required to scale and sustain them. One of the key characteristics of the Digital Age is data – massive amounts of it. Ninety per cent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. That data can be used to solve difficult social, economic, and environmental problems. It could also make all of our problems worse, if we do not build in sustainability at the foundation of the Digital Age – in the data centre.THE FOUNDATION OF THE DIGITAL AGEThe vast majority of data flows through and is processed and stored in data centres – think of massive warehouse-style buildings with hundreds of rows of computer servers humming quietly, drowned out by the noise of huge air conditioners blowing frigid air into the cavernous space. Even when networking, compute, and storage are done “in the cloud” they are done in a data centre.So just as railroads supported industrialization and seaways supported globalization, the data centre supports digitization – a trend no less globally impactful. UNSUSTAINABLE GROWTHThe data explosion has dramatically increased demand on data centres. And that in turn has increased concerns about data centres’ impact on the environment. Data centres are one of the fastest-growing users of energy and water. The kind of growth projected for the digital economy is simply unsustainable without dramatic improvements in data-centre efficiency (see Figure 1).As much as technology has changed, the data centre has not changed much at all. In an economy that favours experimentation over elaborate planning, data over intuition, and iteration over upfront design, the data centre has to be agile, responsive, and scalable. Data centres as they are traditionally built and run are not.REINVENTING THE DATA CENTRESeeing the disconnect between the Digital Age and the traditional data centre firsthand, my co-founders and I knew the data centre had to be reinvented. JAKOB CARNEMARK, FOUNDER AND CEO, ALIGNED ENERGY REINVENTING THE DATA CENTRE TO ENSURE SUSTAINABILITY IN A NEW ERAPictured: Jakob Carnemark046 INNOVATION TECHNOLOGY