Link Securities | The Spanish company has begun converting its old Spanish telephone exchanges into small data centres located close to its customers, much closer than conventional data centres, according to a report today in the newspaper elEconomista.es. Specifically, the telecommunications company plans to distribute a hundred of these facilities throughout the country within five years.
The business opportunity is expected to be a success for Telefónica, as all the sites have been out of use for more than two years – following the shutdown of the copper network – and meet the ideal technical conditions for bringing Google, Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS) and Oracle, hyperscalers with which they already have agreements, as reported by this newspaper in its edition last Monday.
The functionality of these new infrastructures is known as edge computing, a technology that provides computing, storage and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in locations very close to the devices.
For now, the properties already have their physical space, power and high-capacity fibre optic network connection, linked to large submarine cables. They will be Tier 3 facilities, with installed power of between one and two megawatts. In addition to the above, depending on the week, the necessary servers will be added, as well as Nvidia hardware to optimise artificial intelligence inference.
