Powering Up Data Centers in 2025
Industry Update
We expect data center power demands to impact many different aspects of data center designs in 2025. Recently The Uptime Institute released their intelligence report Five data center predictions for 2025. Two of the predictions (predictions 3 & 4) will directly impact data center electrical designs. Prediction #3 recognizes the issues utility companies are experiencing to provide and distribute power to the rapidly growing data center market. Prediction #4 hints at disruptive change in the design of power distribution in the data center.
With data center infrastructure being constructed at unprecedented rates, Utilities have not been able to respond to the power demands of these projects. We believe several trends to mitigate the lack of available power will emerge in 2025:
| 1. | One trend related to power availability will be to go where power is available. Many of these will be adaptive reuse projects. These types of applications reuse and repurpose industrial sites where the utility infrastructure and available power exists. These sites include, but are not limited to steel mills, power plants, aluminum plants, and paper mills. The main considerations for deployment of data center infrastructure in these sites are design time, equipment footprint, and equipment lead times. |
| 2. | Another power availability related trend will be onsite generation. We are starting to see several projects using SMRs (small modular reactors) to power data centers. Other projects are including onsite power generation using fuel cells, gas turbines, or gas generators. Renewables will also be included with the required energy storage to mitigate the intermittent nature of wind and solar power generation. |
In the data center industry, rack densities have been predicted to trend upward for over a decade, but until the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), these predictions have been unrealized. AI data centers present unique challenges in terms of rack densities and in terms of scale. It is not uncommon to see data centers of 1 GW with liquid-cooled racks with densities over 100 kW. In the future, we will see even larger data centers with higher rack densities. To accommodate the larger scale and higher densities, there must be a significant shift in the design of efficient, sustainable, high-capacity data centers. We believe substantial changes will be seen in data center designs in 2025.
| 1. | Simplifying the data center design by using larger power blocks at MV and utilizing MV UPS systems. Today, data centers are designed around low voltage designs (480 V or 415 V) consisting of 3 MW blocks of power. As the scale of data centers increase to 1 GW and beyond, designs utilizing 3 MW blocks strain both supply chains and construction labor resources. |
| 2. | Convergence of UPS and BESS technologies. Because of the scarcity of available power, utility companies may require data center loads to be shed in time of high demand. This along with previously stated environmental goals to eliminate diesel generators, data centers designs will need to include long time energy storage options. Today the short time energy storage in data centers is associated with the UPS systems. Since data centers will not want to purchase two both UPS systems and BESS systems, we are starting to see the demand for UPS with BESS capabilities and BESS systems with UPS functionality at both LV and MV. |
| 3. | Changes to LV distribution designs. For rack densities of 300 KW/rack and above, supplying 240VAC single phase to the IT equipment will be difficult. Disruptive change in the form of designs using high voltages to the rack will be evaluated. Expect the AC versus DC debates to be renewed. |
It should be a very interesting year!
