In 2025, the narrative around AI will evolve from experimentation to maximizing performance. Business leaders will prioritize turning their existing AI investments into tangible results. Achieving this will require the ability to strengthen and streamline the infrastructure powering AI, making it the backbone of competitive advantage in the years ahead.
Below, industry experts share their insights on how businesses can optimize AI and the critical role infrastructure plays in unlocking its full potential:
Liat Mendelson Honderdors, Principal Product Manager at Leaseweb
“In such a short time, AI has rapidly moved into the mainstream thanks to advanced technologies like generative AI and large language models (LLMs), producing everything from text-to-image generators to chatbots mimicking human conversation. But with the excitement came uncertainty, as businesses rushed to adapt to this rapidly shifting landscape. The focus shifted to questions like: How do we integrate AI? How can our products support it? Can we adjust our offerings to align with the growing trend? While major players have established their positions, many companies are still working through the challenges of incorporating AI into their existing offering.
"Looking ahead to 2025, the emphasis will move beyond simply adopting AI. The focus will shift to building tech stacks that truly enhance AI capabilities. As models become more advanced, the demand for robust servers, high performance accelerators, and extensive storage will increase.
"The real challenge isn’t using AI tools and models – it’s ensuring the infrastructure is equipped to maximize AI’s full potential and be flexible enough to allow organizations to work toward their specific needs. While many have overcome the initial barrier of building models, the focus must now shift to deploying and scaling these tools effectively. It's time to consider not just how to use AI, but what tools and systems will fuel and protect its next phase of growth.”
Ken Drones, Director of Data Center Operations, Leaseweb
“Regardless of whether a data center is dedicated to strictly AI operations or a broader scope of deployments, there's huge potential to save significant power, resources, and costs by partnering with a sustainable data solutions provider. AI workloads are often extremely intensive on the infrastructure systems in which it presides. Consequently, these systems require upgrades that consume significantly more power. This increased power not only drives up energy costs but also adds to cooling requirements, as the energy used by the data center is converted into thermal energy that must also be cooled.
"In 2025, data centers face two main challenges: increasing and distributing the required power and effectively cooling it after it is consumed and converted to heat. With the growing demand for AI workloads power consumption in data centers is expected to rise, leading to higher operational costs. To complicate things further, legislative requirements expect data center operators to source a certain amount of their required power in a sustainable and renewable way, which involves substantial investments in renewable energy.
"It’s important for organizations to prioritize selecting data centers with the highest power utilization efficiency where natural cooling can be leveraged. This approach reduces energy consumption and significantly lowers cooling costs.”
