Why the future needs optical data centres

Driverless cars, AI, automated everything – these future technologies all have one thing in common: they’ll make and use huge amounts of data. And our current data centres may not be enough. “The industry is constantly innovating, but the challenge for some data centre providers is keeping up with the rate at which new technologies are emerging,” said Rob Spamer, director of data centres at Pulsant.

That’s particularly true with technologies such as neural networks, which are distributed across thousands of specialised processors that can churn through data 20 times that of a standard CPU. “Because they consumed so much more, they can communicate much more as well,” explained Georgios Zervas, associate professor at University College London’s department of electrical engineering. “You need networks that can sustain this growth.”

Data centres have kept up with the growth in data because Moore’s law has continued to hold: every couple of years, transmission speeds would double. That “law” is set to come to an end, which means we can no longer rely on faster chips to hold up network speeds. There are different ways to address the data centre quandary: build more of them, tweak setups for efficiencies or manage data better using AI. But it’s unlikely any of those ideas will be enough.

Researchers at UCL and Microsoft may have another solution: optical networks. That may not sound very futuristic, but while you may get your internet down a superfast optical line, most data centres still rely