Milan Radia, CEO of Connected Compute and partner at Taranis Capital, joined Mark Walker to discuss the fundamental shift in digital infrastructure as AI workloads transform data centre requirements. The Middle East has emerged as a primary destination for these high-density projects, supported by a combination of strategic connectivity and reliable power access.
Radia explained that the industry is moving away from a “powered shell” real estate model toward highly complex environments capable of supporting unprecedented power densities. While traditional racks previously required minuscule amounts of power, the arrival of Nvidia GB300 chips is pushing requirements to 150kW per rack.
“Liquid is a much better conductor of heat,” Radia noted, adding that the shift from air-cooling to direct-to-chip liquid cooling is now a necessity for modern AI factories. This transition creates a distinct risk of obsolescence for legacy facilities that cannot easily be retrofitted to meet these new standards.
The drive for “on-soil” data centres is also accelerating as governments in the UAE and Saudi Arabia prioritise data sovereignty. Radia pointed out that proprietary AI models are becoming essential for confidential government and enterprise data, necessitating domestic capacity. Beyond training, the focus is shifting toward “inferencing,” where low latency is required to provide real-time responses for users of applications like Gemini.
Infrastructure investment in the region is further propelled by bilateral deals and the availability of advanced GPUs, which are feeding into large-scale projects supported by entities such as IHC. Radia concluded that while the demand for capacity is vast, the winners will be those building distributed, high-density hubs that can handle the specific latency needs of the next generation of software.
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