With data center news moving faster than ever, we want to make it easy for data center professionals to cut through the noise and find the most important stories of the week.
The Data Center Knowledge News Roundup brings you the latest news and developments across the data center industry—from investments and mergers to security threats and industry trends.
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Women in the Data Center Industry
Wednesday was International Women's Day—and an opportunity to both celebrate women's achievements as well as highlight ongoing inequity.
Women in tech rarely receive C-suite (particularly CEO) positions, and when they do, their businesses are underfunded compared to those of their male counterparts. Last year, women-founded startups received only 2.1% of all VC funds raised.
Research has found that this is particularly true, too, within the data center industry. In a recent poll of server warehouse operators, 20% did not employ a single woman.
With data center staffing a “major concern” for operators, opening positions to women would probably help.
Meta Plans for More Layoffs, TSMC Hires Engineers
Of course, this week has continued the pattern of layoff announcements. After an initial round of layoffs in November, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is preparing to cut thousands of positions in the coming days.
On the flipside, Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, has plans to hire a whopping 6,000 engineers in 2023.
The Market Sours on Intel
A cynical market was unimpressed with Intel’s new data center-targeted Agilex 7 FPGA transceiver. After the transceiver’s release, Intel’s shares fell by 1.8% on Tuesday.
In 2022, Intel’s data center market share shrunk by 16% YoY—with AMD winning much of that lost business.
As Intel attempts to reassert its industry leadership and diversify its operations, the company has requested approximately $5 billion in subsidies from the German government to complete a chip manufacturing complex in Magdeburg.
Data Centers in Unusual Places
With the week coming to a close, we’re that much closer to having data centers on the moon. Lonestar Data Holdings completed a round of seed funding to support its plan for a lunar data center. If Lonestar is successful in its mission, the first data center on the moon will be roughly the size of a hardback novel—followed by larger ones offering data storage and edge processing.
Back on this planet, DigitalBridge is considering a minority stake sale in Vantage Data Centers, and construction is being planned for a TikTok data center in Norway, a Microsoft data center in San Antonio, Texas, and an AWS factory in Santa Clara, California.
Measuring—and Reducing—Carbon Footprints
With data centers expected to consume 8% of the world’s electricity by 2030, reducing their carbon footprint is crucial in the fight against climate change.
To help measure and ultimately improve data center energy efficiency, The Green Grid released an updated Total Cost of Ownership Calculation tool—with a focus on the impact of different liquid cooling methods.
Other Great Reads on DCK This Week
7 Ways to Secure Sensitive Data in the Cloud. Klaus Haller delves into the top methods and technologies to help you secure sensitive data in the public cloud—from access control to pseudonymization and everything in between.
Aligning Data Architectures with Cloud Cost Optimization. Chris Tozzi explains details the different possible data architectures in the cloud and offers guidance on which cloud-based data storage, management, and processing strategies yield the best return on investment.
The Changing State of Data Center Auditing Requirements. If your data center auditing strategy is stuck in the 2010s, this article is for you. As new rules appear and old ones evolve, stakeholders must track and respond to these changes if they want to remain in compliance with regulatory and industry auditing standards.
After Holiday Server Meltdown, Southwest Partners With Amazon. Months after a major server meltdown that stranded thousands of passengers, Southwest Airlines has partnered with AWS to address issues with the airline's technology infrastructure and improve its customer experience.
Twitter Faces Second Outage in a Week, Musk Calls It Brittle. Twitter saw its second outage in under a week, prompting criticism from users, including owner Elon Musk, who called the platform he purchased for a cool $44 billion "brittle."
That's all for this week. Which of these stories is most important to you? Let us know in the comments below!
