DCK Must Know: Top Data Center News This Week – July 23, 2021

Welcome to the week’s roundup of all the biggest news in the data center industry, curated, distilled, and put into context by Data Center Knowledge.

DigitalBridge Eyes Entry into the Asian Data Center Market

Chinese billionaire Richard Li’s conglomerate PCCW has been shopping its sizable portfolio of data center assets, and Boca Raton, Florida-based DigitalBridge has emerged as the strongest bidder, Bloomberg reported.

The report is based on statements by anonymous sources, who also said the potential transaction could value Hong Kong-based PCCW’s assets at more than $600 million. The company operates data centers in Hong Kong, mainland China, and Malaysia, according to its website.

Data centers were a good type of asset to sell even before the pandemic, with the right strategic assets commanding high premiums. But the level of society’s reliance on digital tools during the pandemic made digital infrastructure an even more attractive investment.

Azrieli Signals Global Data Center Ambition With Green Mountain Acquisition

After testing the water in the North American data center market with a minority stake in Dallas-based Compass Datacenters, Azrieli Group is making a bigger bet on the market’s global potential.

The Israeli developer and holding company has agreed to acquire Norwegian data center operator Green Mountain for about $850 million, planning to use it as a platform for further expansion in Europe.

Large data center operators have been attracted to Norway, and Scandinavia in general, because of the region’s plentiful hydropower and its cool climate.

Intel’s Hyperscale Data Center Business Slumps Further

The part of Intel that sells its most expensive chips to hyperscale cloud platforms saw a 20 percent decline in sales year on year in the second quarter, the company reported.

That’s the clearest indicator yet of the kind of impact the combination of AMD’s market-disrupting Epyc 2 server chips, introduced two years ago, and the subsequent iteration on the product; hyperscalers’ investments in designing processors for their own data centers; and Intel’s lag in advancing its own manufacturing technology is having on its share of the most lucrative semiconductor market – a market where it enjoyed taking 99 percent of all revenue until only recently.

Intel’s overall server division declined 9 percent year over year, Bloomberg reported.

Nvidia and Palo Alto Supercharge Virtual Firewalls

With Moore’s Law waning, hardware accelerators are all the rage, and Nvidia is doing everything in its power to get ahead of the curve. Its latest move is a partnership with security vendor Palo Alto Networks to run virtual firewalls on the new Nvidia BlueField-2 DPU co-processor.

The companies announced the partnership recently, and their product and technology leads shared the details and the thinking behind it with DCK’s Wylie Wong.

Enterprises and telco service providers have been happy to replace expensive, dedicated firewall hardware with virtual replacements. But doing that has typically meant accepting lower performance. Offloading the firewall workload to the accelerator solves that problem, they said. No more performance tradeoff.

Supply Chain Crunch Driving Up Data Center Equipment Costs

The bulk of the coverage of the massive supply chain disruptions has focused on the chip shortage they have caused (which, in a vicious cycle, has exacerbated the supply problems), but manufacturers all across the globe are short of much more than just chips.

Data center power and cooling equipment vendors have been heavily impacted, for example. As Rob Johnson, CEO of Vertiv, told us in an interview for The Data Center Podcast, components like fans and lithium-ion batteries are in short supply, and so are materials, such as steel, copper, or plastic.

The disruptions have been pushing up prices of data center infrastructure equipment – at a time when demand for more data center capacity is skyrocketing. Johnson described it as “a perfect storm.”

Other great reads on DCK this week:

Jim Whitehurst Left IBM Because He’d Rather Be CEO - Contrary to what some may have feared, the exec's departure wasn't a sign that IBM was trying to make Red Hat more like IBM, reneging on its promise earlier.

Evoque’s Move into Cloud Consulting to Support Hybrid Colocation - The provider powers up its application-centric infrastructure business strategy with a customer hand-holding capability.