It’s a well-known fact that data centers eat up a lot of resources. They don’t just take a lot of power to run, they also handle a massive amount of data. That data burden is only getting heavier, thanks to AI and other modern tech innovations. Now growing businesses are looking for a way to make data centers more efficient, and the solution may involve quantum and nuclear technology.
The Role of Data Centers
As any online business knows, data centers are necessary for modern digital services. Almost every website uses them for hosting, and users pull data from them because it’s unreasonable to expect client-side computers to host everything they access. Your company may keep its own private data centers or rent them from a third-party source.
Site hosting is a quintessential example of how data centers are needed. For the best example, consider a site that uses a lot of images, videos, or animations, all data-intensive assets. iGaming sites fit this criteria, giving users access to digital recreations of popular games like blackjack and roulette. If somebody is playing roulette at PeerGame, their computer receives a simulated roulette table and betting grid, and any other visual assets, from a close, viable data center cache. By doing this, the page loads much faster than it would if the user had to pull the page’s data from the host server, store it on-device, and then process it.
Thanks to the widespread use of CDNs like Cloudflare, this is how virtually every website works today. We have been using data centers to support online sites for a while now, but new developments are calling for a new kind of data center. That would be AI, specifically large language models (LLMs) that require a lot of data for training. Then, once trained, the model keeps iterating and ‘learning’ for itself, so it gets bigger and bigger. That’s why AI data centers have scrambled to expand and reinforce themselves since 2023, when generative AI became popular. All these growing data centers require power, and a lot of it, which is why researchers are trying to solve two problems at once:
- How do we get bountiful, cleaner power?
- How do we improve memory density?
Amazon’s Pursuit of Nuclear Power
To answer that first question, leading data center operators like Amazon Web Services have supported nuclear power as an alternative. Recently, Amazon has committed to building three small modular reactors (SMRs). SMRs are all the rage in nuclear energy research spheres, because they are compact enough to transport and house in factories and data centers, yet they can reach an output of 300 megawatts of electricity.
Nations like Russia and China have already proven that SMRs work, and now Rolls-Royce is at the head of the charge to bring them to Western nations. If that happens, they could energize data centers and futureproof against the advancement of data-intensive innovations like AI.
The Department of Energy’s Pursuit of Quantum Memory
As for that second question, researchers are eyeing quantum technology to create an ultra-dense memory storage solution. This comes from the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Lab, who are proposing a new kind of optical memory device that sidesteps its conventional limits.
Put simply, writing information to a CD is limited because each data point must be the same size as the laser wavelength used to write it. Instead, the researchers propose introducing rare-earth light emitters into the device material. So, when data is written to the device, it has access to multiple light wavelengths within the same surface area, which can then store more information. Research is ongoing, but it has been hailed as a “huge first step” to reducing data demand. For data centers, it means fewer servers and so less power used.
Together, these two innovations could drastically reduce the cost and data burden for every company that does business online today, especially those that host digital platforms or deal in the SaaS space.
