CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS
“ Frankly , no one in the UK is working harder to push the boundaries of data centre sustainability than us ”
LEE MYALL CEO , KAO DATA
face of a sustainability reckoning . From moratoriums on construction to all-out bans on industries like cryptocurrency mining , this energy-intensive industry has never faced harsher scrutiny .
While finding a way to reconcile HPC demand with the need for a fundamental shift in the way that the industry tackles sustainability might seem like an impossibility , there are several organisations working to do just that . In the UK town of Harlow , between Cambridge and London , one of them looks like it might be pulling it off .
Kao Data : HPC and the future of Healthcare “ Frankly , no one in the UK is working harder to push the boundaries of data centre sustainability than us ,” explains Lee Myall , CEO of Kao Data . Founded in 2014 , Kao Data is the UK ’ s leading provider of HPC colocation services . Its Harlow campus - built on the site where Sir Charles Kao discovered fibre optic cable in 1966 - first spun up in 2018 with a 2.2 MW data centre . Since then , the site has grown into what Myall calls “ the UK ’ s only industrial-scale data centre campus that ’ s been specifically designed to accommodate the needs of HPC , AI and GPU-accelerated computing .” In October of the same year , the campus
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