Toshiba realises it can build, power, and maintain datacenters – so builds a team to do it all

Japanese industrial giant Toshiba has created an internal organization to make itself more attractive to datacenter builders and operators. The 95,000-employee company’s business units possess expertise in building power generation plants, providing lighting and cooling systems, and treating wastewater. Toshiba also makes hard …

[Sandtitz]

@Author

"Show us another company that builds power plants, semiconductors, and hard disks"

Samsung.

OK, they sold their HDD business 10+ years ago but are strong in SSD market.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: @Author

Some of these huge Japanese and Sth Korean (and other) conglomerates could probably learn a lesson or two from vertically integrating their various divisions. eg Mitsubishi is operating a wide range of industries from chip manufacture, to HiFi to cars to heavy machinery to fighter jets, chemical plants, banking and god knows what else.

And to expand on your comment re Samsung, they also do heavy Industrial manufacturing, Construction (including power plants), pharmaceuticals, banking and insurance, HVAC and pretty much everything to build a data centre.

When you actually look into these companies, you wonder why they don't interoperate more closely within their divisions. Although according to the Wikipedia article on Mitsubishi, they have a monthly C-Level meeting which was downgraded from a business meeting to a "social lunch meeting" because of fears/accusations of breaking anti-trust laws. The various bits of Mitsubishi are more independent than "mere" divisions of a Mitsubishi HQ though, actually separate companies.

[dryphb]

Re: @Author

Don't they also have a tank division?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @Author

Toshiba have had ups and *down … but they still retain the HDD business. I have 3 of their 16Tb Enterprise Drives in my Synology NAS.

https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/?product_category=enterprise-hard-drives

Hey maybe Hoshiba Nuckear (Westinghouse) is nigvhbe financial train-wreck after all and maybe the start performer in the future for A.I.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Modular data centres

Reminds me of the Sun Modular Datacenter idea. It never really took off, but a modern version stuffed with GPUs, sold alongside matching containers holding diesel or LPG power stations (and maybe ultimately SMRs) and allowing custom DCs to be built like Lego might just be interesting. It would solve the grid connection issue, albeit not in a very 'green' way, but the big IT companies seem to have stopped worrying about that in their desparate rush to AI.