Meeting Data Center Capacity – Demand in the New AI World

This audio was created using Microsoft Azure Speech Services

Vandana Singh:

I’m proud to share that Schneider Electric has entered a strategic partnership with Stream Data Centers to help them serve their customers and support their exponential growth. In our ever-changing industry, it takes true collaboration to deliver with agility and velocity whilst operating in a capacity constrained environment. Stream and Schneider are true partners, invested not only in future capacity planning, but also in developing solutions that will power the future data center landscape. Based on Stream’s customer needs, Schneider creates purpose-built and sustainable technology to support high-density AI workloads and digitize their platforms to provide best-in-class monitoring capabilities.

In its recent “Worldwide Data Center Colocation Market” report, Research and Markets emphasizes that, “power availability and supply chain constraints still daunt the data center market, causing the construction timelines to grow from an average of 18 months to around 30 months.” Coupled with these supply chain constraints are rising construction costs (reported at increases “around 20%-30% across key locations worldwide”) creating an unpredictable and unstable market for many colocation data center providers throughout the world.

When it comes to adapting to these unpredictable market conditions, Stream Data Centers, a company that has delivered 26 facilities and leases 90% of its capacity to the Fortune 100, is ahead of the curve. Stream has a team of technical experts whose mission is to design facilities that remain resilient and relevant even as technological advancements continue to transform the colocation market. Collectively, data center operators are facing a massive surge in demand brought on by the investment in artificial intelligence (AI) by hyperscale and cloud users, which faces “an expected annual growth rate of 37.3% between 2023 and 2030.”

I recently spoke with Michael Lahoud, Chief Operating Officer at Stream Data Centers, to discuss the value of partnership in today’s evolving data center market.

Michael Lahoud:

Having worked with Schneider Electric for the last decade, Stream Data Centers has recently announced a three-year supply capacity agreement (SCA) that allows us to evolve and meet growing capacity demand requirements for our customers.

I am pleased to say that what started as a transactional partnership, wherein Stream turned to Schneider for UPS, switchgear and services throughout our data center builds, has become a long-time partnership rooted in trust. This SCA supports Stream’s mission to serve the world’s most technically sophisticated customers by delivering highly credible, resilient, and secure environments. By solidifying this strategic agreement, Stream can work with Schneider to better predict and manage our customers’ capacity requirements.

Stream needed a trusted partner that could keep up with us, our customer needs, and the technological changes those needs are driving. With its holistic data center infrastructure capabilities and services, Schneider is exactly the kind of consultative and trusted partner that can help us plan and deploy the infrastructure we will need for future growth.

Ten years ago, Schneider provided equipment and services for data center campuses with 10 or 20 megawatts of critical capacity. Today, our individual buildings contain up to 40 MW of capacity, and our campuses support up to 5 to 10 of these massive buildings. As Stream manages this level of growth, the SCA allows us to meet escalating demand head on. Consider this: At the end of 2023, customers were planning for 40 kW per rack (a 4X increase from the standard deployment density) which quickly turned into 100 kW per rack. Now we’re preparing to support IT loads as high as 400 kW per rack in the near future. The agility provided by this SCA will allow Stream to be AI-ready now and to remain so as requirements evolve.

The success of this partnership between Stream and Schneider supports our mission to reliably and predictably serve the world’s largest customers in the new world of AI. It’s not just about serving AI workloads with direct liquid cooling solutions. This partnership helps ensure that Stream can meet the redundancy and energy efficiency requirements of industry leaders in the hyperscale, global enterprise, healthcare and finance sectors.

Schneider is a major player, which helps Stream achieve a level of predictability that gives our company and customers peace of mind. Schneider has the skill and scale to deliver across our customers’ continuum of varying needs — from energy-efficient power and cooling to secure-by-design products. To best serve our customer base, we needed the certainty and peace of mind that this Schneider SCA provides.

A long-term approach to planning

Always innovative and forward-thinking, Stream views this long-term approach to data center planning as a model for the colocation industry at large. This partnership allows us to manage infrastructure planning in an open and transparent manner as we should, versus operating in a traditionally transactional way.

With this SCA, Schneider and Stream can work together openly and transparently to predict our customers’ needs over multiple years, and across Schneider’s service offerings, to meet rapidly growing data center infrastructure and facility demand. Together, we can welcome the new AI world with confidence — and secured capacity.

Vandana Singh:

As Michael highlights, partnerships are critical to our future success. We value our relationship with Stream and have innovated together over the last decade. Schneider Electric is setting the precedent for best-in-class industry partnerships by identifying supply capacity agreements as the model of the future. These agreements are built on a foundation of transparency and partnership, which has become the new competitive differentiator in our industry.

As the need for data centers continues to evolve at an exponential rate, our customers need the ability to plan far in advance to keep up with market demand. These partnerships require proactive, strategic counseling on integrated supply chains, the value of digitalization, and efficient electrification. That ensures these sustainable data centers of the future can accommodate hyper-growth from internet giants and other providers of AI, the Internet of Things, augmented reality, industrial automation, and other applications. We thank Stream Data Centers for trusting Schneider Electric to enable their continued success.

To learn more about how Schneider can bring an end-to-end integrated value proposition to help your company scale efficiently and serve your customers with agility and velocity, please reach out to Bobby Rogers.