The Future of Data Lies at the Green Edge

As we move into the era of digital autonomy, driven by machines and machine-generated data, we need to vastly improve the world’s capacity to manage and process data at a scale previously unimaginable. At Holon, we believe the intersection of data infrastructure and green energy needs to be re-imagined and re-focused on commercial applications to enable significant, sustainable productivity gains and information resiliency for humanity.

The exponential growth of data

Through extensive research and analysis of data trends, The Holon Data Report conservatively forecasts that over 75,000 Zetabytes (ZiB) per annum of data will be created by 2040, largely driven by machine-generated data. This represents an exponential shift from the total of human-generated data that pushed us from 1 ZiB in 2010 to over 100 ZiB 10 years later.

Today, approximately 4 ZiB of enterprise storage is available globally. Based on our data projections, the world will require closer to 1,000 ZiB of enterprise storage, or some 250 times larger than today’s capacity, in the next five years. And even at this level of capacity, the demand for data storage will outpace the capacity for data storage, as energy consumption to meet these data demands is much more than what our current infrastructure can support.

Alongside these exploding volumes of data, the data business model underpinning the world’s largest companies generates over US$300 billion per annum in revenue. In this context, the resourcing for the world’s data growth is now an urgent issue.

Meeting future data needs – Web 2.0 vs Web 3.0

The Web 2.0 technology stack, maintained by air-cooled hardware solutions and grid-supported metro data centres, cannot physically afford to support the level of data creation we anticipate. Simply put, the cost and energy requirements will be unsustainable in a world dominated by machine-generated data (see Part 3 of the Holon Data Report).

However, Web 3.0 data networks represent a profound structural shift in the way we can run data at scale, such as:

• Decentralised Infrastructure - Moving away from having to trust nodes (e.g., AWS, Google, Microsoft) to trusting a network where data is verifiable, significantly reducing storage and compute costs and resources;
• Energy Transparency - Providing complete transparency down to the “byte” – allowing precise energy efficiency calculations for data infrastructure solutions that are not achievable in Web 2.0; and most importantly,
• Data Ownership - Enabling ownership of data through a structure that allows for every data point to become a digital bearer object.

In pursuit of these capabilities, Holon is currently building a bridge from traditional energy architecture to Web 3.0 through two main infrastructure solutions:

• Green Modular Data Centres: Utility-scale, non-latency dependent, 100% renewable-powered centers that interact with the grid to support renewable energy transition; and
• Green Edge Micro-Data Centres: Distributed, low-latency solutions that are 100% renewable-powered.

Building distributed cloud solutions, like our Green Data Centres, where the storage providers own and control the solar, batteries, and IT immersion-cooled hardware, is the only way that we can begin to reduce the energy consumption needed to process a rapidly expanding amount of data. And while this technology is built on a Web 3.0 technology stack, it also has the advantage of servicing Web 2.0 – and beyond.

The future of data economics is green edge

The crux of all of this is decentralised, distributed data infrastructure – bringing closer proximity between the user and data source. In a world of exponential data creation, these edge data solutions will become increasingly valuable as the key generator of efficiencies and economic benefits.

Web 3.0 data networks such as Filecoin are, by design, the ultimate edge solution, with the capability to horizontally and vertically integrate distributed and decentralised infrastructure, energy, and data.

Additionally, storage providers, who are essential in driving the critical infrastructure of Web 3.0 open data networks, have the potential to access two revenue streams (fiat and digital asset rewards) across traditional Web 2.0 data services and emerging Web 3.0 consensus services and verifiability. We believe that this killer combination produces the required economics for Web 3.0 networks to disrupt the current data model, significantly bootstrap their networks, and provide the world with sustainably green, decentralised, and distributed data solutions.

In the future, Web 3.0 data networks will facilitate large-scale data trusts to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges. Green data storage and compute providers will increase in value as they drive the next evolution of the cloud model, where energy and cost efficiency are not at odds but rather aligned features. Inevitably, market forces, consumer demands, and business efficiency push the future of data to this ideal – to the green edge.