AI Hardware and Edge Summit: Driving Innovation to Meet Growing Energy and Performance Demands

Earlier this month, Lumai attended the AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit 2024. It was the perfect place to connect (and reconnect) with the AI hardware ecosystem.

As AI development continues to surge, finding ways to optimise AI hardware and infrastructure has never been more critical. The event featured a host of experts speaking on the topic, and the sobering stats mentioned during the sessions reminded everyone of the scale of the challenge.

AI pervasiveness means data centres are on track to surpass the $1 trillion mark on spend on hardware. This spend is driving the pace of innovation – pushing requirements like never before. Crucially, this is creating a power strain at both data centre and rack level.

In fact, IDC expects global data centre energy consumption ‘to more than double’ between 2023 and 2028.

Delivering a breakthrough in performance

While innovative methods, such as liquid cooling and re-using heat, are being implemented to tackle this growing consumption, the agreement at the event was that specialised hardware and new paradigms are needed to meet this challenge head-on. Existing platforms cannot keep up with demands placed on them from AI models.

To achieve this, there has to be a breakthrough in performance per watt efficiency alongside a breakthrough in interconnect. And if the event demonstrated anything, it’s that we need the whole AI hardware ecosystem to come together to deliver this breakthrough.

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