Welcome to our latest round-up of news from the technology and hosting world. Here’s what we’ve discovered this month.
Shortages Affect AI
While demand for AI has massively increased, a new report from the CBRE Group has shown that shortages of power and land to build new data centres are beginning to cause problems. The European AI market grew by almost 20% in the year to Q1 2024, but with rising construction costs and a drop in availability, down from 19.4% to 11.5% in Amsterdam, the cost of renting data centre space has increased. In Asia, meanwhile, Singapore only has a 1% vacancy rate and also faces severe power limitations, with only 7.2 MW of available capacity. As a result, it currently has the world’s highest rental rates.
The UK has shortages too. While the number of data centres is expanding thanks to ongoing construction projects, problems with power availability, particularly in London which has a very high AI demand, means development is beginning to move to other areas.
SMB Cyberattacks
According to security outfit, Kaspersky, small and medium-sized businesses are facing a growing number of cyberattacks, with the main target being the much-used Microsoft Excel. Infections among SMBs have grown by 5% compared to last year, with more than 2,400 firms discovering malware buried in their software. There has also been an 8% rise in the number of files posing as business software, with over 4000 different types of files identified.
Trojans are the most common threat for SMBs, with 100,000 attacks recorded from January to April 2024, a 7% increase from 2023. The next most common and fastest-growing threat came from malware known as DangerousObjects which had been used in over 17,000 attacks, an increase of 7,000 over the last 12 months.
Besides Excel, cybercriminals are exploiting SMBs’ reliance on services like 365 by attacking Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneDrive. Another big risk, according to Kaspersky, is human error, with SMBs especially prone to phishing attacks. Cybercriminals are also using weaknesses in Facebook to hack small business accounts so they can use them to send spam.
Fastest Data
Engineers at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, better known as CERN and the home of the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC), have created a new high-speed data connection linking the LHC with data storage facilities in the Netherlands. The new link has a speed of 800 Gbps, 11,000 times faster than the average UK home broadband.
The data in the link travels over 1000 miles from Geneva to Amsterdam, along a duplex cable, with light pulses being boosted along the route due to the distance. While the speed is a significant improvement, it is not quite fast enough to keep up with the LHC, which generates a staggering one petabyte of data every second and is expected to produce even more when it is upgraded in 2029.
While 800Gbps is fast, it’s nowhere near the world record. That belongs to a Japanese research team that recently achieved eyewatering speeds of 22.9Pbps. Not only is that fast enough for the LHC; it’s also got enough bandwidth to let everyone on the planet stream movies at the same time.
AI in Telecoms
Phone users will soon need more data to cope with the AI features of new phones, such as Apple Intelligence and Galaxy AI. Telecoms operators, like O2, EE, Vodafone and Three, are already getting to grips with the additional data demands this will put on their services by using AI to manage frequencies and towers, improve services and reduce energy use.
Vodafone, for example, uses AI digital twins to carry out network monitoring and has developed an AI chatbot, called Tobi, powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI, that can handle millions of customer interactions every month. Further afield, Global Telco AI Alliance has also used AI chatbots to improve customer service, while Korea Telecom and AT&T are using it for fault finding and usage prediction.
Microsoft UK Investment
Microsoft has revealed plans to invest £2.5bn in AI data centre infrastructure in the UK over the next three years. In what is the company’s largest ever UK investment, it plans to bring in more than 20,000 advanced GPUs at data centres at Park Royal, North London, the former Quinn Radiator Factory site in Newport and the former Eggborough Power Station in North Yorkshire.
Also in Yorkshire, Microsoft has acquired the Skelton Grange power station site in Leeds where it will house a hyperscale datacentre, a 100MW battery energy storage system, and an energy from waste facility. Bringing Microsoft’s total UK investment to over £4 billion, the Skelton Grange development will also provide industrial and logistics space while returning 28 acres to natural habitat.
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