Today, our Managing Partner Ivan Skenderoski moderated the panel “Gigawatts for Generative AI: Defining MENA’s Energy Strategy” at Capacity Middle East.
As MENA accelerates toward a data-driven, AI-enabled economy, the session explored how the region can meet the gigawatt-scale power demands of hyperscale campuses and GPU clusters, and what must change to ensure energy does not become the bottleneck to AI growth.
Ivan was joined by Matthew Rix, Director, Sales at DataVolt; Shelly Landsmann, Advisory Board Chairman at NED; Menno Parsons, CEO at Master Power Technologies; Domagoj Talapko, Market Development Manager at ABB; and Priyanka Nagpal, Director of Data Centre Capital Markets at JLL.
The discussion looked at the current view of powering large scale data centres with examples from the region such as Datavolt and NED. It noted the need to be agile in the way power set-up is approached as the industry is developing and the AI chipsets are redefining the power needs so agility is required in order not to be stuck in continuous power retrofits. Also the requirement of “green” Data Centre might be misleading and just tick in a box where realities are not always aligned with the concept and some flexibility and logical reasoning might be required. Renewables as growing trends supported from government level in the MENA were highlighted as well as potentially regional policy around power economics and pricing. Finally the people angle and lack of enough resources to build and operate these DC was discussed with some industry calls for collaboration in enabling training centres.
A timely, forward-looking conversation on how bold reform and private innovation can power the next wave of AI at scale across MENA.