Anyone with a shed, an extension cord, a couple of GPUs and an overdraft is building datacenters. Fujitsu just offloaded five

Summary

off-prem Anyone with a shed, an extension cord, a couple of GPUs and an overdraft is building datacenters. Fujitsu just offloaded five ‘Digital transformation’ is a better bet, apparently, so private equity gets a turn The advent of generative AI spurred an enormous and controversial datacenter building boom that has seen almost anyone who knows how to run a bit barn try to expand their business ASAP.Fujitsu, however, wants out.The Australian outpost of the Japanese giant’s business this week announced the sale of five datacenters down under. The company said selling the bit barns “enables us to further invest in the technology services where customer demand is growing fastest.” In Australia, that apparently means “helping organisations modernise critical systems, strengthen cyber resilience, adopt sovereign AI, and access the high-performance and quantum computing capabilities needed for their next phase of transformation.” Fujitsu said its datacenter business “is a strong platform, and its next phase will benefit from dedicated commercial ownership and investment.”That new owner, private equity outfit Next Capital, may have its work cut out for it because some of the bit barns it bought appeared to be rather modest. Fujitsu’s manifest of its Australian properties lists one facility capable of hosting 92MW worth of kit, another with 28MW capacity, plus a 10MW, 4.8MW, 3MW, and 2MW.Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that the paragraph above mentions six datacenters and that earlier in this story we said Fujitsu is selling five. The Register understands Fujitsu has already disposed of the other one to another buyer.Whatever Next Capital bought, it will surely be aware that a modern rack filled with AI kit can require 500KW or more. Fujitsu Australia’s littlest datacenters therefore won’t help the investment company to catch the AI wave unless it invests in upgrades – a process that might be cheaper than building new AI-ready datacenters from scratch and could also in...