Data center command hub keeps AI up and running

Singapore – A steady nerve is crucial when keeping watch over hundreds of data centers worldwide, facilities essential to the frictionless online banking, messaging and AI services that society relies on.

Analysts sit surrounded by digital maps and dashboards at the Singapore command center of U.S. firm Digital Realty, a major global operator of the warehouse-like sites filled with whirring servers.

The goal is not simply to react when something breaks, but to detect warning signs, such as a sudden rise in temperature, early enough to prevent disruption.

Daniel Naing, 37, and his colleagues handle thousands of system alerts flagging signs of trouble each week.

“If I panic, my team members will panic. So even though inside I may be nervous, I cannot show it,” he said.

The command center and its two sister hubs, in Europe and the United States, provide round-the-clock oversight of more than 300 data centers across six continents.

Digital Realty rents its server space to around 6,000 companies big and small, with power disruptions and equipment failure the most common issues faced.

There are also detailed protocols for earthquakes and typhoons, and an approaching storm thousands of kilometers away is enough to put the team on standby.

Booming demand for data centers is a political hot potato in many places, as tech companies race to develop artificial intelligence tools that require massive amounts of computing power.

But without them “nothing works” in our high-tech world, said Serene Nah, managing director and head of Asia Pacific at Digital Realty.

Data centers are essential infrastructure — a matter “almost like national security“, she said.

“We need to be up running all the time.”

Nah said, however, that “our business is very misunderstood” and has little support from the public, who believe data centers emit “a lot of carbon or heat” or “use up a lot of water.”

“Yet everyone’s scrolling their phones every day,” and for each swipe “the data needs to go somewhere.”

The company is prioritising renewable energy such as solar panels and closed-loop server cooling systems that continuously recycle water, Nah said.

The vulnerabilities of the sector were highlighted this year, when data centers run by Amazon’s cloud arm were struck during the Middle East war.

Data centers operate 24 hours a day, so Naing and his colleagues take the 7 am to 7 pm shift in Singapore before handing over to Europe.

Engineers must attend to an alert within minutes. The teams liaise with those on the ground and call on a global network of experts to help, while keeping clients updated.

Digital Realty is one of the biggest providers of data center server space along with rivals like Equinix, also a U.S. company.

Meanwhile tech giants from Microsoft to Alibaba are racing to build their own data centers to train and run AI models — part of a global buildout costing trillions of dollars.

Digital Realty’s Global Command Center in Singapore is housed inside one of three data centers that the company runs in the city-state.

Most areas of the data center, whose roof is lined with solar panels, are off-limits for security reasons.

But one room available for viewing has rows of black server cabinets formed long, narrow corridors, with bundles of yellow cables running overhead and the computer servers’ high-velocity fans emitting a soft hum.

AI is accelerating the growth and complexity of data centers, but for operations at the command center, humans remain indispensable, said Terence Tang, head of the Asia Pacific global command center.

“We still need human intervention to really look at whether or not those are genuine outages, genuine alerts and alarms, because sometimes AI or automation can give you false positives,” Tang said.