The man behind a £50m data centre and robotics project in Salford says his high-tech complex will be cooled by canal water.
Local boy company Media Stream AI (MSAI) is developing a data centre at its Anchorage Place hub near MediaCity. The project will also include a robotics lab to develop and research robotic camera arms to be used for broadcasting, as well as a virtual production studio.
The company is hiring now and will create 70 full-time jobs, and Mr Kenna says he ultimately hopes to employ 150 in Greater Manchester. The data centre is set to open in December.
Mr Kenna is an armed forces veteran who became a media entrepreneur, founding BA Diversity, Inc to promote content aimed at diverse communities. Earlier this year, dedicated to Black British TV channels GenB TV and GenB Movies.
MSAI is also planning the first AI data centre in Jamaica after signing a deal with the government there. That site will serve Latin America, while the Manchester site will serve the European market. MSAI is working with global tech giant Lenovo, joining its Lenovo AI Innovators program.
The data centre will be Media Stream AI’s first dedicated facility, and was launched an an event at KMPG’s Manchester city centre offices. Mr Kenna says the work will support the Ƶ’s “AI Sovereignty Strategy” aimed at ensuring the country has its own data capacity rather than relying on centres overseas.
Mr Kenna said: “It's bringing sovereignty back to, not just the Ƶ, but up north as well.
“At the moment, it is really expensive to make AI, run AI, because you're paying for it and it sits on a cloud in Arizona and you're going through AWS. So, we're bringing it to Manchester.”
Mr Kenna said he hoped the new AI data centre could cut costs for local AI entrepreneurs. And he smiled: “I'm from up north, so when you can save money, you do it.”
He added: “And then we're also a media company, so now we've got all this AI compute, we can use it to power our robotics, camera studios, we can use it to power our personal TV, etcetera. We're only going to use 15% of it, so the rest is there for education, for other entrepreneurs."
The centre will filter canal water and use it to cool the GPUs at the data centre, while it will also have rooftop solar panels, meaning it will use less energy than conventional data centres.
Asked where the idea came from to use canal water to cool the data centre, Mr Kenna said: “It came the second I knew we needed to cool it. I grew up around here, Manchester's always had canals… it just made sense.”
Mr Kenna also hopes that excess heat and warm water from the site could ultimately be used to heat neighbours’ homes, potentially saving them money.
Mr Kenna said the idea for using the water to heat houses came from tech partner Lenovo, which had been working on a similar project overseas. He said he wanted to make sure his business gave back to the community where it was based, and that potentially included working to cut people’s heating bills.
Mr Kenna said: “There's some parts of Salford that have not had the investment that everywhere else has had. So saving a little bit of money each year, even if it's 200 quid on hot water, is a lot in some people's lives. It was a lot in mine, you know?”
