강남일보

Cumulative global data center investment is forecast to approach $1.6 trillion by 2030, while leading technology enterprises will collectively deploy over $600 billion in AI infrastructure capex in 2026 alone. This capital expenditure indicates that the AI Factory market has crossed an irreversible threshold, evolving into a new form of industrial organization characterized by ultra-high capital intensity, strong geopolitical attributes, and complex engineering barriers.

The Transition to AI Factory: Architecture and Paradigms

Omdia defines an AI Factory as a new type of heavy industrial infrastructure whose sole objective is producing intelligence, with the token as the fundamental unit of output. Data centers are transitioning from business support centers to digital product manufacturing centers no matter how big the data center is, organized along a four-layer architecture: energy and physical infrastructure; hardware and network fabric; scheduling and virtualization orchestration; and Model as a Service (MaaS) and AI application ecosystem.

The ecosystem now spans four solution paradigms