How Optical Technology Will Save the Cloud

By Radha Nagarajan, SVP and CTO of Optical Platforms, Marvell

This article was first published by Photonics Spectra

The cloud. It evokes an ethereal, weightless environment where problems get whisked away by a breeze.

In reality, the cloud consists of massive industrial buildings containing millions of dollars’ worth of equipment spread over thousands, and increasingly millions, of square feet. In Arizona, some communities are complaining that cloud data centers are draining their aquifers and consuming far more water than expected1 while in the UK and Ireland the power requirements of data centers are crimping needed housing development. Even in regions like Northern Virginia where the local economies are tightly bound to data centers, conflicts between residents and the cloud are emerging.

With the rise of AI, these conflicts will escalate. AI models and data sets are growing exponentially in size2 and developers are contemplating clusters with 32,000 GPUs, 2,000 switches, 4,000 servers and 74,000 optical modules3. Such a system might require 45MW of power capacity, or nearly 5x the peak load of the Empire State Building. This resource-intensiveness also shows how AI services could become an economic high wire act for many.

Performance up, Power Down: Over 20 years, the data rate of optical modules has increased by 1000x while power per bit has decreased by 100x.

Armchair critics would say the answer is easy: no more data centers! Our daily lives, however, depend on these anonymous beige buildings. Data centers will also play a pivotal role in sustainability. The World Economic Forum asserts that digital technology could reduce emission by 15% by 20304, by fine-tuning power consumption in buildings, homes and factories.

Optical technologies can become a gateway for turning these facilities into good neighbors and putting AI on a firm, sustainable footing. Over the last twenty years, data centers have been increasingly integrating optical into their facilities. Microsoft, for instance, runs more than 200 data centers connected by over 175,000 miles of terrestrial and subsea optical connections5. Equinix, another cloud provider, has 392,000 interconnections5. Streaming and other new services wouldn’t have been able to grow as fast as they did without the exponential improvements in efficiency and performance.

Now, new and upcoming technological advancements are set to launch a chapter in this story.