I was recently approached by a representative of Duos Technologies Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: DUOT) to cover their recent announcement. Specifically, it was about their Asset Management Agreement to manage a fleet of mobile gas turbine engines that will be used to power Edge Data Centers “past the meter.” The perspective from their customer, Fortress Investment Group, is that this capacity is vital for the rapid growth of AI and the power needed to support edge solutions.
This intrigued me because I recently looked at the speeds and feeds going into data centers and realized how much capacity is going to be needed to manage AIoT, and how a giant assumption is that power will be available. The contract states Duos Energy Group will be managing a combined total of 850 MW from these turbines for two years for $42 million.
While not mentioned in the press release, I was particularly concerned with the issues of blackouts and needing power reserves, particularly for industrial enterprises. The agreement will also enable Duos to deploy and operate a fleet of mobile gas turbine engines.
As I stated, the emphasis from the press release is that edge data centers are growing rapidly and the years it takes power companies to increase capacity is unacceptable. These turbines should be running in weeks.
This caused me to speculate how they calculated the need and demand for this solution. Is the expectation that edge data centers are being deployed without a clear forecast?
I recognize that AI doubling capacity somewhere between 5x to 7x faster than Moore’s law and that is more than enough reason to see the need, but the question of architecture is very unclear at the present time. Systems-on-Chip are increasing capacity to participate in AI; then there are edge gateways that may end up in a data center, depending on application and functions within a location. Finally comes the cloud, and the edge data center seems to be based on a small, but similar, architecture as a cloud data center.
The press release states, “We believe this is a significant development and is designed to meet the exploding growth in AI-based data generation, giving companies a greater capability to take advantage of the technology than ever before… Duos says it’s already actively talking with developers of immediate-demand power projects, both in the US and internationally.”
“With grid constraints in some markets and rising demand for power, we believe these assets offer an ideal solution for immediately available behind-the-meter power generation,” said Robert Warden, Managing Director at Fortress.
This mobilized fleet of power stations is going to deal with the dynamics of rapid innovation, but I am fairly sure that many of these deployments are going to be stopgaps and, eventually, some best practices will come into play in design. It just may require us to deploy AIoT to fix AI.
Edited by
Erik Linask
