The era of artificial intelligence factories has begun... a "fundamental transformation of infrastructure" from cooling to storage.

As AI infrastructure enters a new phase, the entire industry is facing challenges of physical limits. Beyond the mere competition of chip performance, we are entering an era that requires a redefinition of power consumption, cooling efficiency, storage device design, and other entire foundational systems. At the Supercomputing Conference SC25, experts from theCUBE research institution referred to this as the rise of “dynamic infrastructure” and emphasized that AI-centered design approaches are fundamentally changing the concept of infrastructure.

theCUBE's chief research analyst John Friar pointed out that the current “AI infrastructure” is a composite concept that needs to consider both chip density and physical facility limits, explaining: “As AI redefines all industries, data centers are also evolving like factories.” Many companies, in order to undertake high-performance computing, are not only restructuring chip configurations but also initiating a comprehensive redesign from building structures, power design to cooling engineering.

theCUBE research analyst Jackie McGuire analyzed: “Although hardware has regained attention, it is no longer purely a performance issue.” She pointed out that as computing density has actually increased, cooling issues have shifted from an afterthought to a core design element. She particularly emphasized that liquid cooling technology has moved from the experimental stage to becoming a necessary infrastructure, and is evolving towards equipping independent cooling systems for each component such as GPUs, AI accelerators, and network cards.

The field of storage technology also calls for innovation. To support proactive infrastructures that enable real-time decision-making and multi-agent models, the speed of data movement, reuse, and preservation will be more critical to performance than mere processing speed. Accordingly, KV caching strategies and storage optimization are becoming the core pillars of the next generation of infrastructure.

McGuire added: “Storage is no longer just storage space, but a key variable that determines the agility of AI applications,” and pointed out that the configuration strategies between memory levels remain a problem to be solved.

It can be seen that dynamic infrastructure is continuously evolving through the close interaction between physical reality and computational technology. New methods such as density control, hybrid cooling, and modular design are fundamentally changing the traditional way of infrastructure construction, making the transcendence of the limitations of storage, power, and space a survival condition for future AI factories.

Through the SC25 conference, experts have clearly stated that AI has transitioned from a mere technology to an era of “physical innovation” that reconstructs the entire infrastructure ecosystem. Currently, AI technology has surpassed the realm of software and is breaking the boundaries between hardware and facility engineering, marking a historical moment where physics has become the new bottleneck.