How do you view the challenge for energy grids of keeping pace with the rapid growth in the data centre market?
There certainly isn’t a magic wand in terms of the change that needs to happen to handle the surge in AI power consumption. As a vendor, we have a clear role to play in manufacturing energy-efficient products of a sustainable quality, but it also needs a collaborative approach across the ecosystem.
At Schneider Electric, we’re working with contractors, design firms and consultants, and looking at how we join the dots between the many different players, including data centre operators, GPU companies, chip makers and other technology providers, to make sure we can plug in end-to-end solutions and provide the best possible services for a sustainable future.
We’re also working with utility companies, which have a huge role to play in all this – not just in the identification of available power, but also in the generation of clean, renewable energy, bringing in battery storage systems that allow us to store power responsibly and use it when needed.
What other measures is Schneider Electric taking to cut power consumption?
Liquid cooling is becoming essential, and more so with data centre architectures transforming against a backdrop of changing thermal dynamics. In line with this, last year we signed a deal to acquire a 75% controlling interest in Motivair, a company specialising in liquid cooling globally. In addition to significant experience in supporting our customers all the way from grid to chip, this strengthens our ability to support them from chip to chiller.
Liquid cooling is inherently more efficient than air cooling of infrastructure, and will ultimately drive up power-usage effectiveness [PUE] in data centres and optimise how they’re working as rack density increases. There has been a lot of conversation on this approach in the past five years and we’re now seeing it start to expand much more, with direct-to-chip cooling seeming to be the preferred industry method that’s landing well with customer bases.
Motivair was also a strong cultural fit for us in terms of how we want to approach and engage our customers by offering a future-proofed experience, as well as our ethos of sustainability and protecting the planet for coming generations.
In which other ways are you seeing the industry tackle power constraints?
Data centres are being built in new locations, with a need to harness power and land away from traditional hubs.
In areas with a dense concentration of data centres and limited grid capacity, such as the FLAP-D markets [Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin], companies need to focus on evaluating off-grid alternatives, thereby creating new hubs like we’ve seen through Digital Realty’s new HER1 facility in Crete and Start Campus’s SIN01 facility in Sines near Lisbon.
These moves illustrate the changing behaviour in the industry, further demonstrated in the increasing demand for prefabricated data centres and buildouts on ex-industrial sites.
AI applications themselves will improve efficiency too, helping further decarbonisation. This reflects the interesting parallel around such applications, whereby more energy is required to power AI training systems and architectures, but at the same time are enabling a much more coordinated and automated environment. Ultimately, the more we can drive automation, the more sustainable we’ll be.
What will all these actions you describe mean for the industry in future?
While we see many predictions suggest that electrical grids may fail to keep pace with growing demand from data centres and AI, we believe this is overhyped – primarily because of the many steps being taken and innovation in the industry to mitigate challenges.
As a result, although energy use has accelerated since 2020 and disrupted compute efficiency due to demands from AI and cloud computing, we at Schneider Electric predict a recovery that will see more efficiency gains from 2026. We believe this will also have a notable impact across the industry by 2030, reducing energy consumption by up to 17%.
To continue moving in the right direction, we encourage the industry to set ambitious PUE targets, explore efficient computing strategies, invest in sustainable energy options and foster collaboration. Without immediate action and collaboration, none of us will win the sustainability race.
RELATED STORIES
