Maelstrom. It is the word with which the interviewee defines the moment in which he is experiencing the construction, equipment and deployment of data centers; an explosion in demand without showing signs of slowing down. If on a global scale the sum of computing capacities grows at 21% annually, in Spain, the average rate until 2026 will be 42% in Madrid and 52% in Barcelona and its respective metropolitan areas. “No one knows where the limit of this market is, among other things, due to the difficulty of quantifying the processes associated with artificial intelligence, but it is obvious that they will require an exceptional increase in installed capacity,” warns José Alfonso Gil, director of service sales in southern Europe of the multinational Vertiv for Spain and Portugal.
Vertiv’s place in the value chain of a data center is existential: it supplies electrical energy management systems, air conditioning equipment and liquid cooling technologies. In general, contracts are negotiated globally or in Europe with large cloud service providers, known in the sector as hyperscalar, or with investment groups that operate co-located data centers (colloquial acronym: colos).
Gil’s mission in the Iberian markets is to help local engineers hired by data center operating companies and then provide service to them in the projects and the after-sales phase. For certain clients, Vertiv develops ad hoc equipment in line with their specific needs. From his point of view, “the risk of instability of any data center does not come from the computing loads, but from the energy that powers them. It is not necessary to insist that any data center is a large consumer of water and electricity. There are known cases in which they manage to absorb the available capacity in an area. “We sellers develop solutions, but we need the help of customers, with whom we share environmental objectives.”
The main line of the needs of a data center is summarized with this formula: more power in less space. And since more power means more heat, it is the task of technology to increase performance – lower the ratio between heat leaving and entering – which has improved enough to reduce heat loss to 1%, which is still a lot.
Right now, if you are remodeling a data center, it is best to adopt liquid cooling. “Thirty years ago, equipment was not decommissioned until it was depreciated, after thirty years; By then, technological change was advancing and only with the change was energy consumption significantly reduced; “Currently, an efficiency has been reached that is difficult to overcome.”
Something similar happens with air conditioning: current systems are much more efficient than those of ten years ago; “In fact, changing equipment that is ten years old pays off because the new investment can be recovered in four or five years.”
The next evolution can be formidable – adds Gil – and concerns refrigeration: “Start taking advantage of heat instead of losing it by throwing it into the atmosphere. Why not use it for heating? Why not propose public and private developments to achieve that objective, which is both economic and social?
Gil does not omit the big problem, the lack of qualified personnel for the variety of necessary functions. Spain DC, a representative association of Spanish data centers, estimates the labor deficit at more than 2,000 jobs.
