“The next industrial revolution has begun. Companies and countries are partnering to shift the trillion-dollar traditional data centers to accelerated computing and build a new type of data center – the AI factory – to produce a new commodity: artificial intelligence,” Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, announced during his Computex keynote in June 2024. Originating in a 2020 article by Harvard professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani, the term “AI Factory” has risen to prominence in recent years. In this research note, we explore the topic to understand what an AI factory is, how it’s different from a data center, what makes it revolutionary, and why the AI factory will depend on smart building technology. The AI Factory An AI factory, not to be confused with an AI-enabled manufacturing facility, is a “factory” that takes raw material (data) then processes and refines it (training) to produce “intelligence” in the form of ready-made AI models and […]