How can Utilities Capitalize on Datacenter Interconnect Market for AI

Billions of dollars are being invested annually in U.S. datacenters to support expanding AI capabilities. Many new datacenters are being built in rural regions where land, electricity, and water are both less costly and more readily available. Yet datacenters must be interconnected to one another and to cloud hubs in metros which is known as datacenter interconnect, or DCI. It is recommended that every datacenter needs 3-4 external connections for resiliency.

This shift toward rural infrastructure opens up significant opportunities for utilities, who can now leverage their fiber networks on top on providing power and water for cooling to support the growing demand for DCI and play a vital role in this rapidly evolving sector.

This session/panel will address:

- Key functions for AI such as Training and Inference - how these impact where new datacenters are being built

- How utilities can monetize their networks to pursue this opportunity beyond just providing dark fiber

- How utilities should plan their networks in response to new datacenters being proposed in their service territories

- How utilities can offer a secondary DCI service over diverse rural fiber that is not typically offered by traditional dark fiber/service providers