Expecting an AI boom?

I recently went down to the smoke, to Tech Show London.

There were 5 constituent shows, and I found what each sub-show was offering - and the size of each component - quite interesting.

There wasn't much going on in Devops Live, to be honest. Relatively few players had shown up, nothing terribly interesting.

There wasn't that much in Big Data & AI World either. I was expecting much more here, and what there was seemed to be on the periphery. More support services than actual product.

The Cloud & Cyber Security Expo was middling, not great, and there was an AI slant in evidence. Not proper AI, but a sprinkling of AI dust on things just to keep up with the Joneses.

Cloud and AI Infrastructure had a few bright spots. I saw actual hardware on the floor - I had seen disk shelves over in the Big Data section, but here I spotted a Tape Library (I used to use those a lot, haven't seen much in that area for a while) and a VDI blade. Talked to a few people, including the Zabbix and Tailscale stands.

But when it came to Data Centre World, that was buzzing. It was about half the overall floor area, so it was far and away the dominant section. Tremendous diversity too - concrete, generators, power cables, electrical switching, fiber cables, cable management, thermal management, lots of power and cooling. Lots and lots of serious physical infrastructure.

There was an obvious expectation on display that there's a massive market around high-density compute. I saw multiple vendors with custom rack designs - rear-door and liquid cooling in evidence. Some companies addressing the massive demand for water.

If these people are at a trade show, then the target market isn't the 3 or 4 hyperscalers. What's being anticipated in this frenzy is very much companies building out their own datacentre facilities, and that's very much an interesting trend.

There's a saying "During a gold rush, sell shovels". What I saw here was a whole army of shovel-sellers getting ready for the diggers to show up.