The rise of AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping our future. No longer just an ‘emerging’ technology, AI is very much here and now – and it’s redefining both consumer experiences and business operations forever.
By 2030, it's projected that nearly two-thirds of all network traffic will involve AI, driven by an exponential growth in synthetic data, multimodal video, and images.
The adoption of Generative AI in particular has been fast compared to other major platforms such as Uber, Instagram, and TikTok – it took only two months for ChatGPT to reach 100 million users.
It’s easy to see why. AI presents unprecedented opportunities to drive innovation, enhance efficiency, and transform industries. However, despite its obvious advantages, the rapid advancement and integration of AI is also reshaping network traffic and data center demands at pace.
The need for increased bandwidth
Analysts predict that AI cloud revenues will grow from $8.5 billion in 2024 to $75.3 billion in 2028, growing at CAGR 72.52%, heralding an incredibly lucrative revenue opportunity for datacenter operators1. But this increased use of AI is also creating demands for increased bandwidth to provide end users with seamless digital experiences.
As well as consumer adoption, AI is becoming a fundamental part of business operations: enabling higher levels of efficiency, innovation and growth. We have reached a critical transformative period where organizations are moving from experimentation to critical use cases for AI, which is shaping the future of their business growth.
The challenge associated to this is the compute and electrical power that AI applications require – due to the large amounts of data traffic that have to be transported to and from data centers across networks all over the world.
$75.3bn
opportunity for data center operators
>12gw
currently under development
Meeting the demand
These unrelenting traffic growth demands will continue to push data center servers to their capacity, so high-volume telco providers, large data centers, and enterprises need solutions to help increase network capacity – such as 800G Waves.
As a result, there is a race to build physical infrastructure. Formerly secondary and tertiary markets are rapidly scaling, and total global capacity is expected to continue its growth across regions – with each set to double or more with current pipelines underway2.
In 2023, there was a record 7.1GW under development across 63 markets1. Since then, that number has grown to over 12GW with substantial growth in both traditional clusters in North America, Asia Pacific, and Europe as well as rapid growth in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East1.
It’s an exciting time – but it’s one that also requires proactivity and swift action.
AI is impacting the industry across multiple dimensions
In business
AI is being applied to realize internal operational efficiency across multiple business units.
In products
AI is being used to optimize Adaptive Network solutions for closed loop operations.
Infrastructure
Organizations are working to enable the global buildout of AI connectivity infrastructure.
Bandwidth
Connectivity bandwidth growth is being driven by increased adoption of AI and cloud.
1 https://totaltele.com/artificial-intelligence-reshapes-data-centres-bandwidth-and-subsea-cables
2 https://cushwake.cld.bz/2024-Global-Data-Center-Market-Comparison
1 Cushman & Wakefield Research, 2024 Global Data Center Market Comparison, March 2024
