The Edge in Review Supplement

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Edge in Review Supplement

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AI, security, and the regional Edge Edge data center security

Cloudflare’s gen AI masterplan

Building the regional Edge

> Unmanned facilities require new thinking

> Why its putting GPUs in more than 300 data centers

> nLighten’s CEO on its quest to dominate Europe

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Contents 4. Edge data center security: The challenge of unmanned resiliency How security might need to change for ‘lights out’ Edge facilities

T

he Edge is not a

8. Advertorial: The mighty micro data center Edge data center deployments are getting more complicated, causing schedules to be hard to predict with any certainty. So, what can you do when you do not have months to wait for a new data center?

10. How Cloudflare plans to dominate generative AI at the Edge Behind the company’s ambitious plans to deploy GPUs across more than 300 data centers 13. B uilding the regional Edge A conversation with Harro Beusker, CEO of new regional Edge company, nLighten

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Pick your Edge

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singular concept.

Depending on who you talk to, the Edge can mean many things.

Did you mean a server closet?

Perhaps you're discussing thousands of tiny data centers at every street corner? Or are you talking about facility-scale sites, but just in underserved regions?

In this supplement, we try to look at each variant of the Edge, and discuss its challenges and opportunities.

Securing the Edge For the smaller Edge, a clear challenge faced by operators is that they can't have permanent human staff.

That means that your data center - or, more realistically dozens of your data centers are out there, alone. Oh, and they're filled with a lot of valuable IT hardware.

This is a scary concept, especially for the paranoia-prone data center sector.

So we talk to Edge operators and vendors about how to keep unmanned data centers off of the radar of would-be thieves, and how to ensure that it's hard for them to break in even if they do decide to raid the facility.

The AI opportunity Edge has grown slowly, ever in search of the killer workload that will help spawn a massive compute roll-out.

Now there are those hoping

that its moment has come, with generative AI set to fund a vast Edge build-out.

We catch up with Cloudflare about its plans to do just that installing GPUs in more than 300 Edge data centers with a vision of dominating the AI Edge.

The company has visions of a new world made possible by AI close to the end user, which it hopes could birth a whole new Internet.

But can the promise of generative AI live up to the hype?

The regional approach Then there's the larger Edge data centers.

The regional Edge looks much like the data center market that hyperscalers planned to displace with their enormous facilities, but hopes to survive by living out at the periphery.

Instead of targeting the wellsaturated markets that handle most of the Internet's traffic, regional Edge players hope to build smaller ecosystems out in cities with fewer facilities and less competition.

Newcomer nLighten has bought its way into Germany, France, and the UK, and has a vision of capturing the European regional Edge market and bringing compute, storage, and connectivity to more of the continent than just the traditional FLAP-D hotspots.

But first, it must overcome Europe's growing set of regulatory hurdles.

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 Edge in Review Supplement

Edge data center security: The challenge of unmanned resiliency How security might need to change for ‘lights out’ Edge facilities

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DCD Supplement • datacenterdynamics.com

Dan Swinhoe News Editor

Security first 

P

hysical security for data centers is table stakes these days; operators are well-versed in how to secure their facilities. But as we move the Edge and

away from the idea of having people constantly on-site, some of these traditional approaches start to become more difficult.

While many companies say they offer the Edge, they are often talking about the ‘regional Edge’; a traditional data center of reasonable size that is manned 24/7. Securing the regional Edge is easy; these are manned facilities that have the same security controls as your ‘traditional’ data center and benefit from on-site security personnel if there is an incident.’

But there are some companies looking to do Edge at the tower and other unmanned sites sometimes called the telco Edge or far Edge. Securing the telco Edge is a more challenging question. These sites are smaller – offering less opportunity to put controls in – and they are unmanned.

The lack of on-site personnel means site monitoring becomes much more important, as do security controls amid a much longer response time.

Another tower firm, SBA, recently launched an Edge data center at a tower site in Arlington, Texas. The company has said it has “between 40 and 50” sites in development. This year Vapor. io has deployed AWS Outpost hardware at a Cellnex tower site in Barcelona, Spain. Vapor said Cellnex has made a 'portfolio of small, carrier-neutral Edge data centers and tower ground space' available for hosting Vapor IO’s Kinetic Grid and AWS Outposts.

DigitalBridge-owned Verticle Bridge – a tower company with the same owners as DataBank – also offers microdata center construction services at its tower sites.

July 2023 saw US digital infrastructure firm Ubiquity acquire EdgePresence – a company that places data center pods at telecoms sites and previously counted DataBank amongst its investors.

Edge security: not a today problem?

The ‘lights-out’ unmanned data center has long been discussed, but there have been few real-world deployments, and none at any scale. Likewise, there aren’t huge numbers of telco or far Edge data centers around the world. But both are coming.

Several tower companies are launching telco Edge facilities, and as 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) & smart city deployments ramp up, the need for more telco/far Edge sites will increase.

American Tower currently operates a number of small Edge colocation sites at tower locations in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Jacksonville, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; and Denver and Boulder, Colorado. In July 2023 it filed to develop a new facility at a telecoms tower site in San Antonio, Texas.

American Tower has said it had identified more than 1,000 sites that could support 1MW Edge data center locations. 2023 also saw Qualcomm announce a strategic collaboration with the tower company, saying it would be installing a 2U Arm-based server at an American Tower Edge data center in Denver as part of a ‘new class of scalable computing resources at the near Edge’.

The Edge becomes more sensitive “In the States, they want Edge because of distance. I think in the UK, we're going to need Edge because of capacity,” says Stuart Priest, founder and managing director of SonicEdge, a UK-based provider of modular prefabricated data centers founded in 2020.

“Edge sites are so far and few currently that I can probably count them on my fingers and toes on proper Edge. But I think the landscape in 10 years is going to be completely different now; we're predicted to have a million IoT devices a year coming online in the UK.” He continues: “Currently, there's enough bandwidth at the moment for everything that's going on around the Edge. Until we start getting a lot more IoT devices on the network; smart homes, sensors on street lamps and traffic lights, smart CCTV, etc, I don't think there's going to be a need to use those sites.”

Telecoms sites are rarely attacked – and usually any incidents are by anti-5G conspiracy theorists or vandals rather than thieves – as there’s generally little of value to steal that can

Edge in Review Supplement | 5

 Edge in Review Supplement customers often ask for modules that are in the SR-3 to -4 rating – meaning it would take someone with power tools up to 30 minutes to break through a wall or door, giving operators and/or law enforcement time to get on-site.

“Whether it's a telco site or an Edge site, if there's no one in the vicinity, then obviously the key thing is to stop people get in, and, if they do get in, stop them getting into the pod so they've got enough time to call the police. Most companies want at least a 30-minute window.”

be easily sold. That means security at some of the more remote or less critical sites could be as simple as a fence, a camera, and a lock.

However, the prospect of placing expensive compute hardware into these sites means their value – and the cost of damage or downtime – increases substantially.

“When we get to a point where compute storage services will be going at those sites, we'll have to ramp the security up. There's absolutely no point building a cheap pod and putting a Rolls Royce inside. There's just no point in doing that, and customers understand that. But the costs will significantly increase for those site.”

Securing the Edge Tower sites and their sheds are commonplace and have security measures, and many of the security controls applicable to existing modular deployments are just as relevant for unmanned Edge facilities.

Anti-climb fences are standard and come in various shapes and sizes, often with barbed wire or similar deterring topper. Some sites may have underground pressure sensors to detect when someone is walking somewhere unexpected, for example, on the inside of a perimeter fence.

Panels and doors have SR ratings – ranging from SR-1, where someone could break through with something like a screwdriver, to SR-8 where the facility could withstand small arms fire and a nearby blast. Priest says

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At a deployment in Aston, a suburb of Birmingham in the UK, SonicEdge deployed a module surrounded by an eight-foot anti-climb fence, SR-4-rated walls, and infrared CCTV, with tremble units on the fences and doors to detect movement.

Priest says SonicEdge paints many of its customers’ modules street furniture color – described as “a dull sort of green or grey – to make them less interesting to prospective thieves.

Nick Ewing, MD of UK data center module provider EfficiencyIT, notes his company will paint modules various colors to the customer specification in order to better blend in with the surroundings.

“With the Edge you don't want it to stand out, these environments have got to blend into their surroundings,” he says.

Once past the perimeter fence, access to the actual data centers from the outside will be protected by a combination of biometrics, fingerprint scanning, key cards, PIN codes, and traditional key locks. Like doors and walls, locks can be rated depending on how difficult they are to compromise.

In the UK, the CPNI has its own grading of lock types.

Once through the outer door, some data center designs will have a vestibule or anteroom with a secondary security door to further secure the data room – and extend the amount of time operators have to respond to intruders.

And even then, racks inside the data halls can be locked down.

“We've got customers where we lock down the racks completely, and

DCD Supplement • datacenterdynamics.com

you've got to have a certain level of classification to even be allowed in a rack,” says Ewing.

Priest says in the three-plus years SonicEdge has been going, no two deployments have been the same.

“A lot of these companies, they want to use the same security across their estate. They don't want their engineers having to learn five or six different systems,” he notes.

Much of the discussions the company has around module deployments are asking customers what security systems they already use so that engineers can hit the ground running without additional training or systems to monitor.

“There isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach to these Edge build outs,” says Elliott Turek, director of category management, Europe, Schneider Electric.

“Many providers want repeatable solutions to take advantage of the economies of scale for CapEx purposes and predictable servicing on the OpEx side, but ultimately there are constraints when it comes to practical action. These sites can be just about anywhere – from busy metropolitan centers to a wooded forest area miles from the nearest highway.”

Automation & meshing key to Edge resiliency Currently, with so few unmanned Edge deployments, there isn’t the same expectations of uptime as traditional data centers, and operational approaches aren’t really set up for a massive distributed footprint.

“I think at the moment because it hasn't taken off so much, the view is if it falls over, when we go and fix it, it will then be working,” says Priest. “The SLA aren't, for example, four hours to get it back up and running, because they are so few and far between. The view at the moment is, if it falls over, when we go and fix it, it will then be working.”

However, in the future if/when the Edge takes off and we do have a huge amount of sites processing and

Security first  with on-site solar and 48-hours of fuel for backup generators to ensure uptime if the grid fails.

But while customers do care about security and will pay what is required to secure sites to the desired degree, both Priest and Ewing concede there is often little consideration in adding ‘N+X’ redundancy to security systems.

transmitting large amounts of IoT data, there will be a lot more reliance on interoperability between other sites to ensure resiliency in the face of security incidents or system failures.

“Some operators can afford N-level redundancy,” says Schneider’s Turek.

“But, in the context of ‘lights out’ Edge sites, it’s a risk that outweighs any cost savings initially realized.”

Priest adds: “There might be someone out there who's going to find £10 billion to build loads of Tier III Edge data centers all around the UK but I just can't see it myself.”

“The consensus at the moment, speaking to my peers, is in terms of SLAs the actual running of the data center will be probably a Tier I,” he adds. “Because there's going to be so many of them that if one falls over, it's just like a WiFi network. The next one will pick it up until it's brought back online.”

“But the security won't be Tier I, because the last thing those customers want who are putting their information in those hubs is that someone can get in there and take it. If we get to where there £100,000 worth of compute sitting in remote data centers, then they will be like Fort Knox.”

Software and automation become increasingly important in large Edge deployments. While operators can currently manually manage the comings and goings and operations of a handful of remote sites with enough planning, it could quickly become overwhelming if the footprint grows.

Likewise, ensuring backup and failure

systems are automated will be critical to ensure availability of services.

“In a distributed environment, you are always working on the basis that one of your nodes is going to fail and your network and infrastructure will be built in a way that you have you have that failover capability,” says Ewing.

Predictive analytics can take away some of the pains of component or system failure – potentially giving notice of incidents before they happen and giving operators enough notice to prepare for or prevent potential problems.

“The beauty with software that we have available to us now is that you can almost predict a lot of these things happening,” says Ewing. “You've got cloud-based applications where you can get predictive analytics on if UPS is going to fail this year or you might want to change a battery out.”

Ewing also notes pre-programmed access with a temporary key card could give customers or third-party contractors access at specific dates and times, pre-programming this is also important when there are multiple sites to manage.

Does Edge security need more redundancy?

Data center industry loves redundancy; millions of dollars are spent making cooling, power, and fiber systems redundant to ensure uptime. This is also true at the Edge; Priest noted a UK telecoms customers was looking to deploy remote sites in the near future

“In terms of backup, we don't just have one camera on one site, we have multiple cameras. And then we also use the other camera on a stalk, which overlooks the whole facility,” says Priest. “So there's a number of redundancies in there to be able to manage that so that it covers multiple angles.”

However, while the cameras may overlap to an extent, if the control systems for access controls are on-site in the data center itself, they often don’t have multiple redundant systems.

“Sometimes these do become single points of failure,” says EfficiencyIT’s Ewing. “You generally have one head end rather than two for example.”

He notes that such systems are also generally designed to fail open.

If power is lost to a biometric system, for example, it would generally be set to fail open on health and safety grounds.

Instead of traditional redundancy, security is often more about layers – the so-called strength in depth.

“In terms of access control, you've got biometric, you've got keypad, you've got some retina these days, and also there's there is a fullback, which is a key system,” says Priest. “Depending on which way they go, there's always basically two ways of entering; you'll have for example a keypad and a lock or a biometric and the lock.”

Ultimately, the resiliency of the facility will have to be dictated by the customers and the workloads in the facility.

“Is it life critical, is it business critical, is it mission critical?” says Ewing. “[If it's serving a] local hospital, I want them to be redundant. I want them to have fail-safes in place so that the work they're doing is supported and is uninterrupted.” 

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 Edge in Review Supplement

The mighty micro data center Edge data center deployments are getting more complicated, causing schedules to be hard to predict with any certainty. So, what can you do when you do not have months to wait for a new data center?

T Peter Kueth, serving as the Director for Partner Technology Offerings at Vertiv, brings a strong background in spearheading cross company tech solutions that align with intricate customer demands. He's worked with industry bodies such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and was one of the contributors to the original DMTF Redfish launch. Beyond Vertiv and the datacenter industry, Peter's experience encompasses leadership roles in Fortune 500 commercial real estate entities and software companies.

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he entire process of deploying a new Edge data center takes about 12 to 16 months. In many cases, an existing space or building will be used to house the new IT gear, but traditionally requires expensive power and cooling infrastructure upgrades before the IT can be installed.

On average, approximately half of the cost to deploy the new data center is actually spent on infrastructure. The other half is allocated to hidden costs such as engineering, design, legal and permitting, and site preparation or construction costs to prepare the space. Fortunately, new solutions are emerging to help streamline the process from start to finish.

For large-scale deployments, a preengineered containerized data center is a well-established concept: built and tested in the factory, and then delivered on the back of a trailer. Drop it into place, connect it to utility power, and then configure the network and you’re pretty much good to go. What could be easier?

However, for many smaller-scale applications a containerized modular data center is likely not a cost-effective fit for the application. That is where micro

DCD Supplement • datacenterdynamics.com

data centers come in —customizable solutions can be assembled on-site and expanded as required, giving you the exact infrastructure solution you need to succeed.

“It’s a similar approach, but in a smaller form factor,” says Peter Kueth, global director of partner technology offering at Vertiv Data Center Solutions. “Instead of building costly white space you can drop it in and you’re off to the races. With a micro data center at the Edge, you can get up and running in just three months from planning to execution compared to an industry standard of around 12 to 16 months.”

All in one Vertiv’s micro data center family called Vertiv™ Smart Solutions is an all-in-one package that combines power, cooling, racks, power conditioning, UPS, and monitoring and management software on a self-contained, compact physical footprint.

Physical security is not neglected.

The enclosures are not only lockable but can come with CCTV connected to the electronic entry systems – either RFID key fobs or fingerprint recognition to

VERTIV | Advertorial  prevent unauthorized access. That means, of course, that you can also see who has accessed the facility..

Kueth likens a Vertiv micro data center to building blocks in terms of the simplicity with which it is put together on-site. It requires just a little assistance from Vertiv services technicans to construct it, and the appropriate trades to wire it up for power and to plumb it in (for cooling.) All this should take no more than a week, and from conception to the ribbon-cutting and warm prosecco should take no more than just three months.

“We’re usually in and out in less than a week. From when we get access to the site, everything should be set-up in two or three days. Then the trades have to do their work – the power has to be set up by a qualified electrician and the plumbing required for cooling by a plumber. Then, when they’re finished, we can help with the verification and testing as well.

“Based on an industrial survey conducted in June 2023, our research shows that the process of permitting, planning and building out a data center of this size currently takes between eightto-12 months, but we can condense it down to just two or three months. And it’s not just about saving time and money, but also removing risk from the process,”* says Kueth.

After all, slashing deployment times invariably also slashes costs, and in this instance not just by a little, but by approximately 30 percent.

“The concept of sealed enclosures is not necessarily new, but we’re reducing the cost of deployment from about $60,000 per rack to $35,000 per rack. At $60k, you’re not financially much better off than building out a room, but at $35k it’s a no-brainer. For the CFO, it means break-even from day one,” adds Kueth.

I want one of those Many organizations are not looking to upgrade their data center estate, but need the ultra-low latency that an on-site data center can provide. Additionally, some organizations have done the math and found that cloud costs are no longer as budget-friendly as they once were.

“Cloud is not cheap anymore, and ingress and egress charges from major * based on data obtained Vertiv customer survey from 06/23

providers are only going up. Moreover, they know they’ve got a captive audience and are charging accordingly. So, right now, the math is often in favor of the inhouse data center, but not all customers are ready to build a dedicated data center building,” says Kueth.

It's true that with the rise of hybrid work, many companies are trying to make the most of their office space. One idea that some are exploring is to use extra office space for on-site data center compute. But Vertiv’s typical customers today are often focused on low latency or high availability applications at sites that may only offer modest levels of IT support.

“A lot of our customers are industrial manufacturers where shaving just a second off of a process that happens 10,000 times a day can save some real money, speed up the production line, and make more products,” says Kueth. One big-name car manufacturer, for example, deploys a micro data center in each of its factories, dropping in a pre-configured solution to run the production line, which can largely be monitored and managed centrally from the company’s HQ. Other major use cases include healthcare organizations that can’t afford an internet outage, especially following the boom in demand for telemedicine as a result of the Covid pandemic, and distribution centers. “One distribution company we supply builds a new center, they take one of our solutions and drop it straight onto the distribution center floor.

It controls everything in there, even the

CCTV security,” he says.

“Some customers even put them in their reception hall, right next to the lifts.

Our customers feel that it gives their visitors a powerful first impression,” he adds.

All installations start with a consultation with Vertiv engineers to ascertain requirements, both in terms of data center compute, as well as the work that might need to be done on-site in preparation. For example, does the site have sufficient space, network bandwidth and power, or will upgrades be required?

Then, Vertiv’s engineers can put together a package that most closely suits the customers’ needs and offer a quick turnaround time from concept to delivery with pre-built solutions. Vertiv's micro data center solutions are optimized for commercial, retail and office, and is designed for challenging industrial environments.

As things currently stand, the micro data center can offer air-cooled densities of up to 20kW per rack. But Kueth foresees the prospect of liquid cooling coming soon to the micro data center. Vertiv, after all, offers direct-to-chip liquid cooling racks for conventional data centers.

That question will no doubt be answered in time – but probably a lot longer than the three months it takes to plan, design and commission a micro data center from Vertiv.

Check out Vertiv's range of Edge solutions, including micro data centers, that can be implemented within weeks.

These solutions are designed to meet the needs of businesses seeking efficient and reliable data management. If you're interested in learning more about Vertiv's Edge solutions, we invite you to explore our offerings and see how we can help your business.

>> T o find out more about Vertiv’s quick to implement micro data center Edge solutions www.vertiv.com/ microdatacenters.

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 Edge in Review Supplement

How Cloudflare plans to dominate generative AI at the Edge Behind the company’s ambitious plans to deploy GPUs across more than 300 data centers

10 DCD Supplement • datacenterdynamics.com

Sebastian Moss Editor-in-Chief

Gen AI at the Edge 

W

here will the models live?

This is the question that could define the next generation of tech titans, as the data center industry scrambles to support an expected - albeit far from guaranteed - surge in generative artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

Model training will happen in large data centers, closer in design to the supercomputers of the last decade than the classic enterprise facilities of today.

They will likely require enormous amounts of power, liquid cooling, and tens of thousands of GPUs. But what about the inference? That is, once the model is trained, where will it live and operate? This AI model will likely need more compute in total in this phase, because it will trained just a few times, but used by millions daily. It will also be more distributed, running on lower-end GPUs or CPUs close to the users.

Training can happen far from users, as models take months to create and are not latency-sensitive. But, once it’s out in the real world and being inferenced by end users, the time it takes to load and respond could become business-critical.

That adds up to a demand for inference at the Edge, according to Edge infrastructure operator Cloudflare.

By the end of 2023, Cloudflare expects to have Nvidia GPUs in more than 100 cities offering its ‘Workers AI’ service for generative AI workloads. Within a year, it expects to have deployed them ‘nearly everywhere’ across its network, which spans data centers in more than 300 cities.

The company began as a content delivery network (CDN) operator, but has expanded into broader networking and security services, slowly becoming more and more like a cloud company.

Now, it wants to dominate the AI inferencing space.

Where the model lives Some people have proposed that AI inference could be delegated right down the end user devices that are delivering the results to users. Today’s phones certainly have a lot of processing power - the iPhone 15’s A17 chip has six GPU cores giving enough performance for 4K video at up to 60fps - but Engates says this is nowhere near enough for inference.

“A certain amount [of generative AI

work] is going to be done on the device,” John Engates, field CTO, told DCD. “But it's limited, the device has only a certain amount of processing power and battery capacity. The GPUs are nowhere near as capable as what lives in a data center.

“People like to talk about what the latest iPhone is capable of in terms of GPU, but when you stack it up against an Nvidia GPU running in a server, it’s orders of magnitude on top of orders of magnitude different in terms of capability.”

While some smaller models can run on devices - just as voice recognition for AI systems like Google Assistant is handled by the phone - Engates believes that the limitations of the hardware will mean that the larger and better models are more suited for the Edge.

a lot of sense, because you've got to really think about how latency affects the performance and what we could do to turbocharge applications.”

This bears further unpacking: With generative AI changing so rapidly, the exact end use cases remain unknown.

Certain workloads like image generation take time to create artwork, so shaving off a few seconds of latency will have limited impact.

Users have reported frustration at the speed of ChatGPT conversations, but it’s likely more to do with the speed the model takes to run (alongside GPU shortages) than the physical proximity to users. While it will still benefit from being at the Edge,

“[Meta’s] Llama 2 is more than 100 gigabytes,” he said, far too large for portable devices.

“If we can host that at the Edge, and do some inference with these GPUs, we can take a lot of the bandwidth limitations and performance limitations away and combine those with what lives on the device. It's not an ‘either-or,’ but maybe a ‘both.’”

Where latency matters “Our whole business model is built on small data centers everywhere - some of them are fairly substantial, but generally speaking, small and everywhere,” Engates said. “They're living inside of cloud providers or telcos or the data centers that exist in a particular geography. Every geo is different; every country has its own challenges.”

That has led to a vast, globe-spanning infrastructure focused on reducing latency.

“We’re 50 milliseconds from 95 percent of the world's population,” he said. “What can you do with that? Security makes sense, distributing content makes sense.

And then AI inference at the Edge makes

Engates says latency will become more critical in the next generation of AI. “Think about a voice application like Siri. You’ll want it to be immediate, you’ll want it to be like the conversation you and I are having right now,” he said. “And that's going to require a pretty cool combination of on-device, in the cloud, and at the Edge.”

Engates admitted that we don’t yet know what the latency-sensitive applications will be, noting that selfdriving cars could benefit from generative AI to help perceive the world.

While current autonomous vehicles have become skilled at image recognition,

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 Edge in Review Supplement Engates is hopeful that the market feedback will point to something transformative, akin to the key technological leaps of times past.

“It reminds me of these big inflection points in our lifetime,” he said. “My career goes all the way back: When I started in the early ‘90s, the Internet was new. I started an ISP right out of university, and I left to go help start Rackspace as the CTO for almost 18 years.

“The next big inflection was mobile, and then the next one was cloud. Now we're here with AI, and it seems to me almost bigger than the others combined.

It's taking advantage of all of them and it's building on them to launch this new thing.” a large language model could help explain those images to the car - for example, the car may be able to recognize a man or a child by the side of the road, but the LLM would be better at understanding that the child could be more likely to suddenly dash out into oncoming traffic.

Such cars, however, are likely to continue to rely on on-board compute for inference, given the obvious need for extremely low latency.

The Edge will also serve another, more mundane, function for generative AI: Compliance. Data is already tightly regulated in some regions, but the mainstream breakout nature of generative AI could lead to far more government oversight. Different nations will demand different versions of models to suit their own takes on freedom of information, copyright, job protections, and privacy.

Constrained Cloudflare’s Workers AI will include its own restrictions. It will not support customer-provided models, and only support Meta's Llama 2 7B and M2m1001.2, OpenAI's Whisper, Hugging Face's Distilbert-sst-2-int8, Microsoft's Resnet-50, and Baai's bge-base-en-v1.5 models.

Cloudflare plans to add more models in the future, with the help of Hugging Face.

“You've got to start somewhere,” Engates said, seeing this approach as ensuring that “the basic use cases are up and running.”

But he expects the use cases to expand: “We're going to have to figure out some systems for managing the costs associated

with hosting your own models and how those live in our cloud. I think caching is probably the biggest thing - how many places do you want the same model to live? How fast does it need to be available in these different locations?

“There will be customers that ask us for very specific things over time, and we'll have to figure out how to enable those. This was about trying to show people what's possible, and get it out there quickly. Then the team goes back to work and iterates for the next round of releases.”

The first wave There’s enough demand for this first step into generative AI to support the initial roll-out, Engates said.

“People are all trying to experiment with what they're going to do with generative AI - I saw a number of people building their own chatbots right on top of Cloudflare’s Edge. Another person built a Google Translate-type system in 18 lines of code. The goal is just to make it as easy as possible for developers to try things out and get them up and running. It's early days and a lot of these things are still in beta mode.”

But he hopes that Workers AI will move beyond experimentation and allow new projects to come out of the infrastructure, with the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality that Edge proponents have often hoped for.

“I imagine very soon these will mature and turn into things that people will rely on every day with very, very strict SLAs around uptime and performance,” he said.

“We have to get it out there for people to tell us what they want.”

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A new network It’s hard to say just how profound this moment is.

There’s a possibility that the bubble bursts and Cloudflare will have to curb any wider ambitions and repurpose the GPUs for other applications, including its ongoing efforts to use AI to make its network smarter.

Then there’s the possibility that the concept lives up to the hype - that every business runs its own model (or at least version of a model), and every person regularly converses with an instantaneous virtual assistant over voice or even video.

That could require a shift-change in the scale at which Cloudflare will have to operate. It may require more capacity than can be provided at the smaller or more telco-focused data centers it often frequents, necessitating more wholesale deployments and bigger Edge deployments.

“Within Cloudflare, there are different layers of what we consider Edge. There's the Edge that's inside of a cabinet in somebody else's data center, versus larger infrastructure in places like New York that have considerable population,” Engates said.

“Cloudflare’s network is going to evolve and change over time - this is a living, breathing, thing,” he said. “We've invested in people that really understand the hyperscale market very well, our teams are growing in terms of being able to innovate in that context.

“It’s all so that we can become the foundation for all this cool stuff that we think is coming.” 

nLightenment 

Building the regional Edge A conversation with Harro Beusker, CEO of new European Edge company nLighten

Georgia Butler Reporter

D

“ Harro Beusker, CEO nLighten

ata centers used to be a niche market, something ‘new,’” Harro Beusker recalled.

“But today when you look at a smartphone, the back of the smartphone is a data center.

Everything you do on this smartphone is processed in the data center. You might be in church, you might be in school, but this is done in a data center.”

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Now that the market has matured, “the question we have to look at in Europe is why is all the processing concentrated in four or five cities? That’s illogical. Let’s go closer to the customer. Let’s develop that asset class.”

Beusker, co-founder of nLighten, is one of a number of data center executives hoping to build the ‘regional Edge.’ These are not the closet-sized Edge that may one day blanket cities, nor are they the enormous mega-structures pitched by the hyperscalers. Instead, they live in-between, as small data centers in traditionally underserved cities.

“They are spread over the country, and closer to the customer,” Beusker said. In February 2023, nLighten came out of stealth with a portfolio of 10 Exa Infrastructure data centers in Germany from backer I Squared Capital.

In the eight months since then, nLighten has almost tripled its portfolio.

June saw the company acquire Euclyde Data Centers in France, taking over their six facilities in Sophia Antipolis, Lyon, Strasbourg, Besaçon, and Paris.

This acquisition was swiftly followed by another in the United Kingdom: Proximity became nLighten-ed, and with it, the new regional Edge player brought its total portfolio up to 26 facilities across three countries.

“The main motivation was ‘business,’” explained Beusker. “We want to roll out over the whole of Europe, that’s the goal.

“We've looked for companies where there is chemistry, and also deploy the type of data centers that match our goal.

But then we also, of course, looked at

sustainability to make sure that there was at least a basis to work with.”

A big part of Beusker’s argument for the regional Edge is his claim that it is simpler to reconfigure smaller data centers to make them sustainable than it is to change an entire major campus.

Germany notably passed an Energy Efficiency Bill in September 2023. The bill has placed strict requirements on data centers - though admittedly laxer than those originally proposed - including that data centers over 200kW should reuse 20 percent of their heat by 2028, and all data centers opening on or after July 2023 should reach a PUE of 1.2.

Fortunately for nLighten, this was already more or less in line with its game plan, though of course still a challenging prospect.

The PUE challenge for colocation data centers is notable - and ultimately nLighten’s regional Edge facilities are small, localized, colocation data centers - as these facilities cannot always guarantee full occupancy or choose the hardware tenants choose to put in the data center.

As for waste heat, “we have a 3MW data center in Eschborn that is not too far from a new government building - the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) - which is a large office building with around 1,500 people working there, and a swimming pool that was looking for a source of heating,” Beusker said. “We came together to find a solution, and at this moment we are building a 1.5km long piping system to bring the heat over to the swimming pool

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at the government building.”

While this project is very much in process, Beusker was keen to point out that it was not a simple task. “This is not easy, because we need to build these pipes and the government needs to be able to receive this and make it into a heating system, but we got the capacities to match - our 3MW facility is roughly the same or slightly more than what we need to bring to the GIZ building.”

Besides the practicality of developing the system, there is also the simple fact that this costs money to build.

Regardless, this is the ultimate goal and will eventually be rolled out in the rest of Germany and, eventually, in nLighten’s other markets. “It’s not easy. It will take time, but it is real, and it will happen.” nLighten has also, at the Eschborn facility, replaced the diesel generators with new models that can be run on multiple gas sources. For now, the company is using biogas, though if hydrogen is ever a plausible option in the industry those generators can be reconfigured.

Biogas is produced by raw materials such as agricultural waste, manure, sewage, plant material, or food waste as a result of anaerobic digestion with anaerobic organisms or methanogens.

The resulting gas is mostly carbon dioxide and methane, and may have small amounts of hydrogen sulfide, the latter two of which can be combusted or oxidized for energy.

“For this season, we are using those generators as normal. But, starting next

nLightenment 

“We have a 3MW data center in Eschborn that is not too far from a new government building with around 1,500 people working there, and a swimming pool that was looking for a source of heating. We came together to find a solution.” > Harro Beusker nLighten

season, we will have a secondary use for them and this is to support the power companies in Germany. When the grid is at a deficit in solar and wind power, we can supplement it with our gas-fueled generators.

“The advantage of that is twofold.

The grid can use renewable energy for longer periods of time instead of turning to natural gas or oil, but also the electricity company does not need to up the capacity of their oil plants. They can manage the peaks of demand by using local energy sources like ours, and we run that on renewable sources.”

Ultimately, solutions like this are easier to achieve on a smaller scale. The regional Edge data centers can support the local regional grid, without demanding the power needs of entire cities.

But beyond all of this, we need to answer the question of who the regional Edge is really for.

“Our primary focus, customer-wise, is the enterprise market. The ‘digital transformation of the world.’ If you are in Stuttgart and want to undergo that transformation, you really need to go to a commercial data center. But now, rather than going to Frankfurt for that, you can access the same technology from the nLighten network in Stuttgart,” Beusker said. nLighten is building up a collection of channel partners to ensure that customers get the same experience at a local level that they would expect in a major data center. Beusker also said that the company is pursuing cloud and managed service providers as a

secondary customer group: “We’d love to have those companies come to us and use our data centers as a basis for their services.”

But, according to Beusker, the drive for the latter customer base to reside at the regional Edge is latency, a motivation he predicts will increase as we see more latency-reliant industries in use day-to-day.

For example, in Germany, nLighten has connectivity to the main hubs of Deutsche Telekom which services more than 60 percent of the country's population and has a latency of between two and six milliseconds.

Beusker points to the gaming industry - and his customer base of gaming platform providers - as one sector that particularly requires low latency. The experience needs to be instantaneous and reflected for all the players who may be in different locations. This is well known within the gaming industry, with providers often having multiple Points of Presence to ensure a good experience regardless of location.

“Gaming platforms need that low latency and are very interesting customers, but there are many more. For example, manufacturing with Industry 4.0, that's definitely a market that needs lower latency,” said Beusker.

Then, of course, there’s the hype market of today: Artificial intelligence. “AI is not yet leading the low latency push for interaction with the customer. That's not there yet, but we will get there. The ultimate killer application is automated driving and for that, you do need the low latency, but also data gathering for AI.

“There are benefits to doing that locally, so that you don't need to put all this massive amount of data over the network to one central location. Instead, you can do the data gathering and learning in local apps and then send the results to the central location.”

Much of the automated driving workloads will happen on the car themselves, and the Edge’s role in selfdriving cars is not certain.

It is also important to note that applications like AI often require an extremely high density. Beusker said that the majority of nLighten’s customers are currently looking at densities between 5kW and 10kW, but the company can currently provide for up to 20kW. Ultimately, a lot of these industries are still in their infancy or adolescence, but if and when they come to full maturity and fruition, nLighten hopes to be well-placed to serve them.

The company hopes to expand across Europe in the years to come, eventually operating 70 to 90 data centers.

“Our first focus is to make more steps in Western Southern Europe. That’s until, say, 2024. From there we will scale up and explore Eastern Europe.”

As it does so, it will push up against other rivals hoping to build out the regional Edge. “A lot is the same, between us and our competitors like AtlasEdge and others. A lot of the things we do are similar, but that’s a good thing.

“We are creating this new asset class, and there is more than enough room for three or more parties.”. 

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