The innovation and rate of growth in artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications are staggering. Autonomous cars, fraud detection, business intelligence, affinity marketing, personalized medicine, Alexa, Siri, smart cities and the Internet of Things (IoT) are just a few of the commercial and consumer-driven applications exploding in use on a global scale. Underlying these offerings are dense computing platforms and IT infrastructures that require highly specialized data center environments in order to perform reliably and scale efficiently. Legacy on-premise or colocation data centers, built years ago to support general-purpose computing servers, are becoming obsolete in certain markets due to the intense power and cooling requirements of the HPC and AI servers. These servers are built upon processing-intensive components such as graphics processing unit (GPU) cards and dual central processing unit (CPU) architectures.

So, you want to scale your computing muscle to train bigger deep learning models. Can your data center handle it? According to Nvidia, which sells more of the specialized chips used in machine learning than any other company, it most likely cannot. These systems often consume so much power, a conventional data center doesn't have the capacity to remove the amount of heat they generate. It's easy to see how customers without infrastructure that can support a piece of Nvidia hardware is a business problem for Nvidia.

Data center rack density is trending higher, prompted by growing adoption of powerful hardware to support artificial intelligence applications. It's an ongoing trend with a new wrinkle, as industry observers see a growing opportunity for specialists in high-density hosting, perhaps boosted by the rise of edge computing. Increases in rack density are being seen broadly, with 67 percent of data center operators seeing increasing densities, according to the recent State of the Data Center survey by AFCOM. With an average power density of about 7 kilowatts per rack, the report found that the vast majority of data centers have few problems managing their IT workloads with traditional air cooling methods. But there are also growing pockets of extreme density, as AI and cloud applications boost adoption of advanced hardware, including GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs.