The Sustainable Data Gravity Paradox

What is ‘data gravity’ and how does resisting its pull help our customers move towards sustainable digital infrastructure? Verne CEO Dominic Ward’s latest blog explores why separating data and applications between those that justify metro locations and those that can take advantage of more efficient sustainable locations can make all the difference

In today’s digital economy, data isn’t just growing - it’s pulling everything with it. This phenomenon, known as data gravity, means that as data expands, it attracts more applications, workflows, and processing power to a single location. But as businesses generate more data than ever before, the weight of data gravity is creating major challenges in scalability, cost, and sustainability.

The term ‘data gravity’ was first coined by software engineer, Dave McCrory, who described the gravitational pull that large masses of data seem to exert on IT systems, drawing an analogy to physics, which posits that objects with sufficient mass will pull objects with less mass towards them. Within the concept, it follows that the greater the mass of that data, the more gravitational pull it will have.

Understanding Data Gravity and Its Impact

This phenomenon is now a defining challenge in the evolution of digital infrastructure, affecting where and how data is stored, processed, and accessed at scale. 

To some extent, this has been at the center of the model by which all digital infrastructure has developed over decades. Historically, data sets were monolithic, often created from one source, stored in one location, and processed in a linear manner. Data and the infrastructure supporting it grew for decades in centralized locations, often dictated by proximity to internet exchange connectivity.

Today, data creation is dynamic, growing at a scale that is hard to contemplate, is omnipresent, and perhaps most importantly is incredibly valuable. With AI, IoT, and machine learning applications generating exponentially larger data volumes, organizations are struggling to keep pace with the gravitational effects of their own data growth.

The scale and volume of data sets continues to grow exponentially with 90% of the world’s data created in the last five years. However, the more data we create, the greater the mass, the greater the gravity, and the harder it becomes to escape the gravitational pull of that data set. This is now creating significant challenges.

The Data Gravity Problem

The historic proximity requirements of the digital infrastructure industry, and the data gravity that has resulted, has created an over-concentration of the digital infrastructure industry in metro locations, such as London, New York, Dublin, Frankfurt, Ashburn, and Amsterdam. Some of these locations can no longer support the current, let alone future, growth being drawn to them. As data gravitates to those concentrated areas, the physical infrastructure of land, buildings, water and most importantly power, cannot keep up.

The Sustainability Challenge of Data Gravity

Beyond space limitations, the operational sustainability of these locations is also in question. For example, current estimates suggest that data centers in Dublin will soon be consuming 20% of the city’s power, which is ten times the estimated global average and up from closer to 5% only seven years ago. 

This enormous growth has largely been driven by hyperscale cloud operators, such as Microsoft, Google, and AWS expanding their data center footprints in a location in which they have been established for decades. As a result, metro locations are seeing power grid instability, increased energy prices, and unsustainable carbon emissions associated with non-renewable power sources.

Even worse, the cloud operators unnaturally increase the strength of data gravity with immensely high data-egress costs from their platforms. This is clearly unsustainable in more ways than one. Not only must there be a finite level of resources available for this type of infrastructure at some point in time, but Ireland’s energy production relies heavily on a predominantly carbon-generating grid, meaning that its data center industry is far from green.

Availability of power and infrastructure is one factor, as is the economics of the digital infrastructure industry, particularly the data center industry, which has also changed significantly. Due to recent events, the power prices in London and Frankfurt have risen dramatically, increasing the cost of operating data centers enormously. This has a knock-on effect for the economic viability of storing and processing data in these historically gravitationally-dense locations.

A Summary of the Issues for Businesses

To summarize, businesses in many industries face an extensive and evolving suite of challenges:

• Over-concentration in metro locations: The gravitational pull of data has led to an over-reliance on metro hubs like London, New York, and Frankfurt, straining their infrastructure and power grids.
• Power consumption challenges: Some cities, such as Dublin, are seeing data centers consume up to 20% of total energy supply, far exceeding global averages and leading to power grid instability.
• Environmental concerns: Many metro data centers rely on fossil-fuel-heavy energy grids, significantly increasing their carbon footprint and making them unsustainable in the long term.
• Rising operational costs: Power prices in key metro areas have surged, making it increasingly expensive to store and process data in traditional high-density locations.
• Cloud operator constraints: Major cloud providers impose high data-egress fees, reinforcing data gravity and making it difficult for businesses to transition to more cost-effective and sustainable solutions.
• Limited scalability: As data generation accelerates, metro data centers face space, energy, and cooling limitations that hinder their ability to support future workloads efficiently.

The Cost Implications of Data Gravity

Companies now face a choice: continue absorbing rising costs and carbon impact, or seek a more sustainable alternative. Does it still make sense for a German company to process all of its applications and data in a data center in Frankfurt if the price to do so has risen fivefold in the last twelve months?

Overcoming Data Inertia

Data gravity creates challenges. As data sets grow and the gravitational pull of those data sets increases, more concentration and pressure has been put on the historically centralized digital infrastructure locations. Not only are those locations running at or beyond capacity, they are also not sustainable. Therein lies the Sustainable Data Gravity Paradox. The greater the data gravity of a location, the more pressure is placed on its finite resources under the current model. Something has to change, and it can.

Some data is latency-sensitive, such as in high-frequency trading, for example. Some must reside in a specific country for data privacy regulations. Other data must be hyper-connected, as is the case for content distribution. For these types of data, there is likely a strong need for it to be located, stored, and processed in a specific location. Cost, efficiency, and sustainability may play a less important role in the location of that data as a result.

However, what about data that is less latency-sensitive, does not have specific data privacy requirements, or need to be hyper-connected? Should that data also reside in resource-constrained, expensive, inefficient, and less sustainable locations? One would hope the answer is, ‘no’. 

Shifting Towards Sustainable Data Gravity Solutions

Organizations must rethink data placement strategies and embrace the shift toward hybrid and decentralized models that allow workloads to be processed in more cost-effective, energy-efficient regions. The fact is, if your data or applications can sit in a cloud environment, it can probably sit anywhere, as you rarely have control or knowledge over where your data resides in a cloud environment.

Data gravity can be strong, but what if the gravitational pull of lower cost, more efficient, more sustainable digital infrastructure pulled harder than the gravitational pull of the data itself? Data is by nature inherently mobile. Terrestrial, wireless, and subsea networks transport massive, almost unimaginable, volumes of data around the world at increasingly fast and lower-cost rates. 

By shifting non-latency-sensitive workloads to locations powered by renewable energy, businesses can significantly cut their carbon emissions while enhancing operational resilience. 

Breaking the Data Gravity Paradox

It is possible and it is time to break the Sustainable Data Gravity Paradox.

At Verne, our data center customers can be more efficient and can save 75% of their data center costs by locating their digital infrastructure in our sustainable data center facilities in Iceland and Finland when compared with metro locations like London and Frankfurt. Beyond cost savings, this shift offers a dramatic reduction in environmental impact, with organizations able to lower their carbon footprint by up to 98%

If you’re ready to reduce costs, lower carbon emissions, and future-proof your data infrastructure, get in touch to discover how Verne's sustainable data centers can help you overcome data gravity challenges today.