As 2024 arrives on the heels of UN COP28, the technology industry will be unable to ignore the importance of climate resiliency given most companies’ significant impact on – and potential to help – the environment.

As we continue to cover the sustainability efforts of the data center, cloud, telecom and networking industries, here are the major trends to watch for next year.

More vendors will get involved with electricity grid modernization efforts

Tech giants with the spare capital will expand collaborative efforts to aid the energy transition, or the modernization of electricity grids, in 2024. By both reimagining existing technologies for grid decarbonization use cases and innovating to create new technologies, industry leaders will dedicate resources to improve the sustainability of global electricity systems – and their own environmental footprints.

Electricity grid modernization typically looks like the addition of renewable energy sources like solar, wind or battery power to traditionally carbon-intensive power grids. But modernization is also needed on the distribution side of things. At the edge of the energy grid, “the technology capabilities don’t exist to be able to optimize and balance all that new load,” Intel’s GM for the Energy Center of Excellence Mike Bates told SDxCentral.

Intel is one such company using its technology to support grid modernization efforts. As part of the Edge for Smart Secondary Substations (E4S) Alliance, the chipmaker is pioneering a software-defined approach to energy grids by building small-scale data centers inside electrical substations – the central inflection points for delivering electricity.

Gone are the rows of old, proprietary electrical and mechanical equipment in grid substations. In come server racks.

In 2024, we expect this trend to continue, with major tech players pioneering new and innovative approaches to the challenges of transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Liquid-cooled data centers will be the infrastructure of choice for AI

High-performance computing (HPC), like what’s required for artificial intelligence (AI) training and inferencing, necessitates more energy and compute power than general compute. To keep costs and environmental impacts in check, look for more efficient silicon, software and processes that will emerge to address the needs of bringing HPC to the average enterprise.

Dell’Oro analysts similarly predict the market for data center infrastructure will grow to historic levels next year, thanks to AI. As of Q3 2023, thermal management infrastructure was one of the fastest growing segments of the market, so expect to see an influx of customer interest in alternative cooling methods and expanded deployments of liquid cooling in public clouds next year.

But given the short timeline between the emergence of AI and board expectations for deployment, IT teams had little room for proper heat and energy management infrastructure deployment, Dell’Oro Research Director Lucas Beran told SDxCentral.

As a quick fix, many IT teams turned to supplemental high-density air and air-assisted liquid cooling, which makes it possible to deploy AI infrastructure in data centers that were designed to be air-cooled. But in 2024 and beyond, data centers designed specifically to support liquid cooling technologies at scale will rise to meet the sustainability and power needs of HPC infrastructure.

As AI workloads continue to be deployed, data centers that leverage liquid-cooling technologies will be high on IT teams’ wishlists in 2024.