Artificial Intelligence

NCSC CEO warns AI must improve cyber security

The CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre has called for robust security systems in the early development of AI, amidst concerns that proper security measures are being overlooked. As businesses race to develop new AI products, a former intelligence chief explains that malicious attacks could have a “devastating” effect due to the rate AI is being developed in comparison to security. AI is set to play a huge role in many aspects of everyday life, from our homes and cities to high end national security, however, as businesses rush to develop products and secure their position in the market, the risk of misuse could act as a threat. The news follows the UK’s AI whitepaper, released earlier this year, which aims to put the UK on course to be the best place in the world to build, test and use AI tech after investing £2.5bn in the emerging technology since 2014. Suid Adeyanju, CEO of RiverSafe, comments, “AI-enabled cyber attacks present new challenges for security teams, adding increased complexities for organisations when protecting their devices and their data. Businesses evaluate their defence strategies to adapt, boosting their cyber security capabilities to ensure they are prepared for when an attack happens, either directly against their organisation or along the supply chain.” “Upskilling cyber workforces and ensuring diverse teams that can offer new and innovative ways of thinking to elevate expertise is an important part of the solution to defend against the new AI-powered threats. For businesses to protect themselves against the imminent and increasing threat of AI in cyber, strategies must be reassessed and more robust processes must be introduced.” Lindy Cameron, CEO of the NCSC, comments, "The scale and complexity of these models is such that if we don't apply the right basic principles as they are being developed in the early stages, it will be much more difficult to retrofit security." Click here for latest data centre news.

Over 1,300 business leaders declare AI as a force for good

More than 1,300 experts have signed an open letter to collectively emphasise the positive potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and relieve concerns about its impact on humanity. Coordinated by BCS, the open letter aims to challenge the pessimism surrounding AI and promote a more optimistic perspective. According to Rashik Parmar, CEO of BCS, the overwhelming support for the letter demonstrates the UK tech community's resolute belief that AI should be viewed as a "beneficial force" rather than "nightmare scenario of evil robot overlords". This comes standing in opposition to the recent letter signed by influential figures, such as Elon Musk, which called for a pause in developing powerful AI systems, citing the perceived "existential risk" posed by super-intelligent AI. The BCS signatories include experts from various businesses, academia, public institutions and think tanks, their collective expertise and insights highlight the myriad positive applications of AI. Sheila Flavell CBE, COO of FDM Group, says, “AI can play a key role in supercharging digital transformation strategies, helping organisations leverage their data to better understand their business and customers. As the UK continues to show its commitment to developing AI for good, it will help increase Britain’s position as a tech superpower and positively bolster the economy as its usage becomes widespread. In order to harness the full power of AI, the UK needs to develop a cohort of AI-skilled workers to oversee its development and deployment, so it is important for organisations to encourage new talent, such as graduates and returners, to engage in education courses in AI to lead this charge.” Hema Purohit, a specialist in digital health and social care for BCS, emphasises AI's ability to enable early detection of serious illnesses, like cardiac disease or diabetes, during eye tests. To further support Britain’s position as a global exemplar for high quality, ethical and inclusive AI practices, UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak will host a global summit on AI regulation this autumn. Challenges are emerging, including the potential automation of up to 300 million jobs, prompting companies to pause hiring in specific roles, but these must be approached pragmatically. Regulations will be a vital safeguard against the misuse of AI, instead of hasty and unregulated proliferation. As the world grapples with the powers of AI, these expert voices will provide valuable insights and perspectives to guide its responsible development and implementation. Click here for more latest news.

atNorth announces highest revenue to date

atNorth has announced a group income of SEK 560 million (EUR 53 million) as it publishes its 2022 annual accounts. This figure represents a 44% increase in revenue from 2021 and further growth is expected in the coming years.  The company currently operates six data centres based in Iceland, Sweden and Finland. It is planning further state-of-the-art sites in the coming years. atNorth‘s growth calls for extensive investment and it has secured access to capital for this purpose. The investment for the year 2022 amounted to about SEK 220 million (EUR 20 million), and it is already evident that the 2023 level of investment will be significantly higher. Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson, CEO of atNorth, says, "In recent years, we have built an enormous wealth of knowledge. Our customers value our services and it is core to atNorth's good reputation." He also commends the support of the company‘s sponsor, Partners Group, that acquired the majority of the company's shares at the beginning of 2022. As digital transformation and the use of AI and other big data projects escalates, businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on supercomputers to perform ever more complex calculations. The resulting need for high performance data centre and supercomputing services has led to an exponential increase in demand in recent years. atNorth continues to promote the Nordic region as a superlative location for investment in digital infrastructure, recently winning the ‘Tech Capital Location’ award for Iceland as a result of its advantageous climate, favourable business environment and cutting-edge infrastructure. Eyjólfur comments, “Iceland is truly on the map, and with our best-in-class data centres, outstanding customer service and proficient marketing communications, atNorth is proud to have created a desirable position in the market.”

VMware unveils research on NHS data storage

VMware has unveiled a research sharing that the majority (87%) of UK consumers believe it is important that their NHS patient data is stored in the UK. The study of more than 2,000 UK citizens has revealed that people still have cyber security concerns when it comes to where their personal and sensitive data is stored. Of those who stated it is important for their data to be stored in the UK, more than a third (39%) think that their data stored within the country’s national borders would ensure it complies with UK data privacy regulations. A fifth (22%) do not trust other countries to safeguard their data as well as the UK, and 21% think it will be less susceptible to foreign cyber threats or access foreign entities. Despite this, the research shares a good level of trust in the NHS when it comes to storing and analysing patient data. For instance, 59% of respondents expressed confidence in the NHS's ability to safeguard their sensitive information. But when asked about where their data is stored, most UK public had doubts on their data residing outside of their national boundaries. Businesses share the same attitude. 42% of business leaders are extremely concerned about their critical data being managed by US cloud providers, and 62% have expressed that their current clouds are not meeting their data sovereignty requirements, according to the latest IDC research. Many NHS and social care providers today use non-national public clouds. This means that patient data is currently hosted in a provider currently deemed adequate by the UK, however, if this is a non-national provider, the data could be subject to external jurisdictional control. “This consumer opinion matters as it echoes business sentiment. These findings demonstrate the increasing importance of data integrity and sovereignty in helping the NHS, among other highly regulated industries, realise and unlock the true value of their sensitive and critical data," says Guy Bartram, Cloud Evangelist EMEA, VMware. “By embracing cloud sovereignty, the NHS can build public trust and assertively maintain governance, fortify data protection and help unlock the true value of critical and sensitive patient data in delivering patient services.” "While there are vast rewards to be harvested through applying AI to healthcare data, we have to remember that each data point relates to a patient, and every patient should trust that their privacy is maintained,” says Darren Adcock, Senior Product Manager, Redcentric. “By harnessing the power of AI and advanced technologies within a secure and sovereign cloud framework, the NHS ensures that groundbreaking advancements in healthcare never compromise patient privacy and trust. Sovereign clouds serve as a pivotal enabler, allowing the NHS to drive progress responsibly, ethically, and with the utmost dedication to patient wellbeing.” Sovereignty extends beyond where data is stored, but also how it is used by platforms such as AI, which analyses the data to feed algorithms. The general public surveyed hold diverse opinions regarding AI in healthcare, with 45% open to its use for improved services and 44% happy with the NHS using the technology to process their patient data, if it helped the NHS to process diagnostic tests faster. However, concerns exist, with 25% saying they are against the NHS using AI to process their patient data. “Ongoing digital transformation and the increased use of emerging technologies such as AI, have spurred both excitement for true innovation to revolutionise our NHS, but also a new urgency for how this boom in data will be securely managed and stored,” says Dr Will Venters, Associate Professor of Information Systems, London School of Economics. “With the increased use of multiple clouds to create, store and distribute apps, which the NHS needs, relies on from frontline clinicians through to optimising operations, it is essential to patient trust that the NHS protects sensitive patient data, and this can be achieved by protecting it with sovereign clouds. AI has created new data opportunities so it is critical the NHS can make better use of its data, to build a resilient and patient-centric healthcare system that the UK needs.”

Snowflake and NVIDIA to help businesses build AI applications

At the Snowflake Summit 2023, Snowflake announced that it is partnering to provide businesses of all sizes with an accelerated path to create customised generative AI applications using its own proprietary data, all securely within the Snowflake Data Cloud. With the NVIDIA NeMo platform for developing large language models (LLMs) and NVIDIA GPU-accelerated computing it will enable enterprises to use data in their accounts to make custom LLMs for advanced generative AI services, including chatbots, search and summarisation. The ability to customise LLMs without moving data enables proprietary information to remain fully secured and governed within the Snowflake platform. “Data is essential to creating generative AI applications that understand the complex operations and unique voice of every company,” says Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “Together, NVIDIA and Snowflake will create an AI factory that helps enterprises turn its own valuable data into custom generative AI models to power ground-breaking new applications, right from the cloud platform that they use to run their businesses.” The collaboration represents a new opportunity for enterprises. It will enable utilisation of its proprietary data — which can range from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of raw and curated business information — to create and fine-tune custom LLMs that power business-specific applications and services.By integrating AI technology, customers can quickly and easily build, deploy and manage customised applications that bring its power to all parts of its business across a variety of use cases. “More enterprises than we expected are training or at least fine-tuning their own AI models, as they increasingly appreciates the value of their own data assets,” says Alexander Harrowell, Principal Analyst for Advanced Computing for AI at Technology Research Group, Omdia. “Similarly, enterprises are beginning to operate more diverse fleets of AI models for business-specific applications. Supporting them in this trend is one of the biggest open opportunities in the sector.” Custom models for healthcare, retail, financial services and more With over 8,000 customers worldwide, the Snowflake Data Cloud gives enterprises the ability to unify, integrate, analyse and share data across its organisations, as well as with customers, partners, suppliers and others. In addition, customers can build and share leading data applications at scale with the data cloud.The company’s unified platform offers industry-specific data clouds to help deliver innovative solutions across multiple verticals and lines of business. The collaboration will further enable customers to transform these industries by bringing customised generative AI applications to different verticals with the data cloud. For example, a healthcare insurance model could answer complex questions about what procedures are covered under various plans. A financial services model could share details about specific lending opportunities available to retail and business customers based on a variety of circumstances.

Kao Data partners with Zayo to expand connectivity options

Kao Data has announced that it has signed a partnership with Zayo to expand the connectivity solutions at its data centre campus in Harlow.  The partnership will see Zayo deploy two new points-of-presence (PoP) at its KLON-01 data centre, which will directly enable new multi-gigabit lit and dark fibre capabilities. The new agreement and network connectivity will also allow enterprise organisations to connect directly from the US to Europe, while bypassing London’s busy Internet routes via Zeus-Zayo’s ultra-low-loss, subsea fibre optic cable, which runs from the UK to the Netherlands. Zayo operates one of the industry’s largest fibre networks, and owns a Tier 1 IP backbone spanning 141,000 miles across North America and Europe. Its network provides business and mission-critical connectivity to support the digital economy, and its capabilities will further strengthen Kao Data’s mission to provide a suite of world-class connectivity options at its Harlow campus. Its Harlow campus is renowned for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Its infrastructure platform, for example, connects prestigious research and financial services organisations into Europe and other global destinations. The campus is also home to the supercomputer, NVIDIA’s Cambridge-1, as well as several high density AI workloads and grid-computing deployments from Tier 1 financial services organisations. Resilient, low-latency connectivity is crucial to facilitate the large data transfers synonymous with this form of computing, and Zayo’s network will play a key role in this pursuit by offering connectivity across global financial hubs. “As dependency on digital infrastructure continues to accelerate, it is vital that we provide customers working across cloud, enterprise and financial services with diverse and resilient connectivity solutions that minimise latency,” says Spencer Lamb, CCO, Kao Data. “Zayo’s extensive network provides our own and our partners’ customers across financial services, AI, cloud, and enterprises with the speed, reliability, and diversity they need to be successful and gain a competitive advantage in today’s market. We are happy to partner with Kao Data on our shared efforts to reshape digital connectivity and ensure our customers stay ahead of the curve and thrive in today's fast-paced digital ecosystem," says Yannick Leboyer, Chief Operating Officer at Zayo Europe.

STT GDC and Firmus to build sustainable AI factories

ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) has announced a significant investment into a global venture with Firmus Technologies. The venture is to be based in Singapore and will see the launch of a GPU-centric Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering focused on deep learning AI and visual computing workloads, to be known as Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC). SMC will deliver bare-metal-service access to high-performance AI clusters, which include some of the world’s most advanced workload accelerators including GPUs and high-speed networking from NVIDIA for energy-efficient computing. It will leverage Firmus’ proprietary, scaled, immersion-cooled platform, the HyperCube, to deliver sustainable AI factories that are all at once sustainable, scalable, high-performance and cost-effective. Within the HyperCube, Firmus will operate a fleet of high-performance servers provided by OEM partners including Supermicro. It unlocks access to world-class AI tools and hardware in a highly available way. The SMC is being launched in Singapore, India and Australia in 2023, with the Singapore AZ (SIN01) expected to be live in H2 2023. The combination of Firmus’ platform, paired with STT GDC’s highly efficient data centre infrastructure, will result in AI workloads running with a lower PUE, lower CO2 emissions and higher petaflops per watt. “The compound growth in forecasted energy consumption is an existential threat to the data centre sector. Data centre operators and their customers must be prepared to embrace and support new cooling solutions and expand the services they offer beyond traditional air-cooled colocation if they are to host AI GPU platforms in a sustainable manner. The evolution of the data centre into AI factories of the future will fundamentally change the way that all infrastructure operators are thinking about the design and operation of their facilities. STT GDC’s foresight and long-term vision made them the ideal global partner for Firmus’ highly developed solution,” says Ted. “The future of data centres will rely on the ability to provide both exceptional performance and highly sustainable services at scale. From our beginnings in Singapore almost 10 years ago, we now have scaled the business to cover 10 geographies. We are immensely pleased to enhance our core co-location offering to include the latest GPU-based bare-metal services, empowering our customers with access to the next generation of high-performance computing which will be so critical in the AI revolution. These high-performance services are a key component of the critical infrastructure needed to support the plethora of AI use cases that will be critical to business, governments and society in years to come,” says Bruno Lopez, President and Group Chief Executive, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres.

AMD announces its future vision for data centre and AI

AMD has announced its vision for the future of the data centre and pervasive AI, showcasing the products, strategy and ecosystem partners that will shape the future of computing. The 'Data Center and AI Technology Premiere' highlights the next phase of data centre innovation. The company was joined on stage with executives from Amazon Web Services, Citadel, Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft Azure and PyTorch to showcase the technological partnerships to bring the next generation of high-performance CPU and AI accelerator solutions to market. “Today, we took another significant step forward in our data centre strategy as we expanded our 4th Gen EPYC processor family with new leadership solutions for cloud and technical computing workloads, and announced new public instances and internal deployments with the largest cloud providers,” says AMD Chair and CEO, Dr Lisa Su. “AI is the defining technology shaping the next generation of computing and the largest strategic growth opportunity for AMD. We are laser focused on accelerating the deployment of AMD AI platforms at scale in the data centre, led by the launch of our Instinct MI300 accelerators planned for later this year and the growing ecosystem of enterprise-ready AI software optimised for our hardware.” The company was joined by AWS to highlight a preview of the next generation Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, ‘Amazon EC2’, M7a instances, powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors, ‘Genoa’. AMD has introduced the 4th Gen AMD EPYC 97X4 processors, formerly named ‘Bergamo.’ With 128 Zen 4c cores per socket, these processors provide great vCPU density, performance and efficiency for applications that run in the cloud. Meta participated in discussing how these processors are well suited for their mainstay applications such as Instagram, WhatsApp and more. It has also unveiled the AMD 3D V-Cache technology, with x86 server CPU and shared its AI platform strategy, giving customers a cloud, to edge, to endpoint portfolio of hardware products, with deep industry software collaboration, to develop scalable and pervasive AI solutions. The AMD Instinct MI300X accelerator is one of the advanced accelerators for generative AI, along software ecosystem momentum, with partners PyTorch and Hugging Face. It is based on the next-gen AMD CDNA 3 accelerator architecture and supports up to 192GB of HBM3 memory to provide the compute and memory efficiency needed for large language model training and inference for generative AI workloads. Finally, there was a showcase of the ROCm software ecosystem for data centre accelerators, highlighting the readiness and collaborations with industry performers to bring together an open AI software ecosystem. PyTorch discussed the work to fully upstream the ROCm software stack. This integration empowers developers with an array of AI models that are compatible and ready to use on AMD accelerators. Hugging Face also announced that it will optimise its models on AMD platforms.

DEAC Latvia discusses the impact of AI on data centre operations

In a quarter of a century, data centres have transformed from a niche industry to one of the most important parts in people's daily lives. Although many do not realise it, the pictures they take, the content of their favourite entertainment services and even online shops are stored in modern data centres that occupy areas the size of sports arenas. Everything that happens on the internet is connected to data centres. Consequently, global challenges and new opportunities directly affect this industry. It is important to understand how disruptions in the production of digital infrastructure, cyber security issues, and the entry of artificial intelligence into business and other current events affect the development of data centres. Data storage facilities become more expensive Undoubtedly, the industry is adversely affected by supply problems of modern technologies that started during the pandemic. Its production volumes have still not returned to previous levels. Therefore, many manufacturing industries are competing over semiconductors, chips, cables and other components. The lack of spare parts and new equipment is also affecting data centres. In addition, while equipment and car manufacturers are already used to the situation, data centre builders are truly facing the problem now, as building a data centre takes several years. It means that equipping the new centres started very recently. And the prices are much higher now than they were before the pandemic. As a result, data centre expansion projects are more expensive and the size of data storage facilities can no longer be expanded as quickly as before. Avoid wasting gigabytes This is not good news for businesses and end consumers, as competition for space in data centres will intensify and every terabyte will have to be used more rationally. It will be especially interesting to watch what the world's biggest consumers of server power will do. These companies traditionally reserve space in data centre servers three to five years in advance. If they continue this practice to the usual extent, it will create a problem for smaller consumers. Most data centre and cloud service providers have already increased their prices, and it is expected that they will increase further in the second half of the year to cover the costs of using additional storage facilities in data centres. This will also place some responsibility on the end users. Until now, many users have freely uploaded their images, videos and other content to cloud storage or video platforms without thinking about the number of gigabytes used, but they will have to change this habit in the near future. Perhaps service owners will be forced to set stricter limits or a higher price per gigabyte, and older content that has not been used for a long time may be deleted. Latvian companies are currently building the third DEAC data centre in Riga to tackle this issue, and it will be put into operation as early as 2025. The new data centre DC3 will have up to 1,000 racks with a total capacity of 10MW and will be certified according to the requirements of the Tier III standard. This certificate sets safety standards regarding the design, construction and maintenance of data centres. Although it has been planned to complete the construction works by the end of 2024, potential customers can already reserve a place in the new data centre. Self-production of electrical power The new trend of generating electricity very close to a data centre could become a useful method for reducing costs in the long term. Data centres consume a lot of electrical power, because the building not only contains thousands of servers that run continuously, but also cooling equipment for maintaining a favourable working climate for the machines. Recent fluctuations in electricity prices have encouraged data centres to build its own power plants. The new DC3 will use electrical power produced only from renewable resources. Even the back-up electricity generators use a green solution like fuels produced from 100% renewable resources. As the chemical formula of the substance is identical to fossil diesel fuel. AI will help Another solution to keeping control over the costs and saving space could be the promising artificial intelligence that is gradually entering the data centre industry. The generative AI or equipment capable of creating original content will make it possible to personalise services and rationally use available space. AI algorithms will customise language, recommend the most appropriate features for customers, perform detailed programming, create design and content, and provide customer service. At the same time, AI will make sure that the processes take place as efficiently as possible and do not unnecessarily waste space on the servers. All of this will contribute to the reduction of costs that are currently being passed on to relevant service providers. It must be noted here that only recently AI has started showing its ability to be a useful help in business, therefore useful AI powered solutions for automation may become common in two to five years. However, there is an area where radical changes are not expected, and that is cyber security. The activation of cyber criminals experienced in the last year and a half makes it necessary for data centre employees to be maximally vigilant and adhere to the highest cyber security standards. It means that if the data centre has received an appropriate certification, then customers can be certain that their data will be taken care of. They will be protected from attacks, as well as backups will be available even if one of the servers stops working.

Why high-speed cable assemblies must be considered

Siemon has published a new product and application guide that provides data centre designers and operators with valuable insight into the benefits that high-speed cable assemblies can deliver in support of higher bandwidth, low latency applications in the data centre. Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, edge computing and other emerging technologies are widely adopted in enterprise businesses today. This drives the need for data centre server and storage systems to deliver speeds well beyond 10Gb/s in support of these applications. Siemon’s new guide details how Direct Attached Cables (DACs) and Active Optical Cables (AOCs) can deliver performance, reliability, scalability and power efficiencies to cost-effectively adopt these emerging technologies. A key focus in the guide is data centre topology and how fixed lengths DACs and AOCs can support shorter in cabinet connections or connect servers across multiple racks in End of Row (EoR) or Middle of Row (MoR) configurations. In addition to providing a detailed overview of the cable options available to scale and support transmission speeds all the way to 400Gb/s, the guide also addresses the rising challenge of latency. With latency impacting real-time technologies such as virtual reality, high frequency trading and blockchain, direct attach copper high-speed cable assemblies deliver distinct benefits over and above structured cabling for increased network performance. Common concerns relating to equipment density and switch port utilisation can also be addressed through high-speed cable assemblies. The guide demonstrates how DACs and AOCs can be deployed to connect a single higher speed switch port to multiple lower speed servers using 4 x 10GbE, 4 x 25GbE, 4 x 100GbE or 2 x 200GbE breakouts. “Whilst there is no one single solution for connecting servers in data centres, high speed cable assemblies offer a number of advantages and should be considered a valuable alternative to other cabling options”, says Ryan Harris, Sales and Market Manager for high speed cable assemblies at Siemon. “We have created this guide to help data centre designers and operators make informed decisions when selecting cabling for their data centre server and storage systems, especially when future technologies must be supported that rely on high-speed, low latency cabling for optimum performance.”