Rearchitecting the Datacenter Lifecycle for AI

The rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) has driven an enormous demand for AI inference infrastructure, mainly powered by high-end GPUs. While these accelerators offer immense computational power, they incur high capital and operational costs due to frequent upgrades, dense power consumption, and cooling demands, making total cost of ownership (TCO) for AI datacenters a critical concern for cloud providers. Unfortunately, traditional datacenter lifecycle management (designed for general-purpose workloads) struggles to keep pace with AI's fast-evolving models, rising resource needs, and diverse hardware profiles. We rethink the AI datacenter lifecycle scheme across three stages (building, IT provisioning, and operation) highlighting how power, cooling, and networking decisions affect long-term TCO. We focus on hardware refresh strategies aligned with evolving hardware trends and evaluate operational software optimizations that further reduce cost. While these optimizations at each stage yield benefits, unlocking the full potential requires rethinking the entire lifecycle. We present a holistic lifecycle management framework that optimizes decisions across all three stages, accounting for workload dynamics, hardware evolution, and system aging. Our approach reduces TCO by 40% compared to traditional methods and offers guidelines for managing AI datacenter lifecycles in the future.