After 30 years at Schneider Electric, across five countries and several different parts of our business, I believe the next decade could be one of the most exciting I have experienced. AI is driving extraordinary demand for digital infrastructure with data centers we once considered large at 20 or 30MW being dwarfed by 500MW developments and even gigawatt-scale campuses.
But scale is only part of the story. AI is changing how infrastructure is designed, where it can be built, how quickly it needs to be delivered and what customers expect from their partners. As I take on the leadership of our Secure Power and Data Center business in Europe, three areas stand out to me.
In the AI era, speed wins I spent 20 years of my career in supply chain. Today, I believe supply chain has become one of the most important competitive differentiators in the data center industry. The customer conversation has changed, years ago much of it centered on technology. More recently, price and procurement became dominant. Today, customers still expect the right technology and economics, but increasingly the critical question is ‘how quickly can you deliver, and how certain are you that you can do it’?
Demand is moving faster than industry supply capacity. At the same time, data center developers are making commitments based on when new capacity will become operational a delay is no longer simply a project problem it can become a significant business risk.
I believe this requires a different relationship between customers and technology partners. The traditional approach of dividing a project into packages, optimizing each independently and integrating everything later can introduce complexity when we need to remove it. Instead, we need to collaborate earlier. By co-designing architectures upfront, we can simplify execution, anticipate supply requirements and reduce risk. An integrated approach can also create the potential for meaningful cost optimization while compressing project timelines truly becoming out customers chosen energy technology provider.
In the AI era, certainty has value and the supply chain is no longer behind the scenes it is becoming a competitive advantage.
Power is changing the map of European data centers
For years, data center site selection depended on land, connectivity, permitting, skills and economics. All still matter. But increasingly, one question comes first ‘Where is the power’?
We can already see this reshaping Europe. Markets with available and competitive power, including France and the Nordics, are attracting significant attention, while constraints are making development more challenging in some established markets. At the same time, AI is increasing density inside the data center, changing requirements for both power and cooling. I have long thought about Schneider Electric’s capability of offering the complete powertrain from grid to chip. But physical infrastructure is only part of the equation. Power, cooling, software, automation and control increasingly need to be designed as one system. By integrating these capabilities upfront can help customers reduce execution risk while creating the intelligence required to manage resilience, efficiency and sustainability from day one. My ambition is for us to become the undisputed leader in energy and cooling management for the data centers powering the AI economy.
And we need to look beyond today’s build cycle. The next several years will be dominated by new AI infrastructure. Beyond that, I expect another major opportunity as the installed base is modernized and existing facilities adapt to new power, cooling and density requirements. Edge computing will remain important too, particularly as AI inference expands and the largest campuses encounter constraints around power and land.
AI infrastructure needs people as much as power
There is one issue I believe our industry needs to discuss much more and this is people. We spend a lot of time talking about megawatts, GPUs and cooling technologies. But every data center needs people to design, construct, commission and operate it. As the industry grows, so does the skills challenge.
Operators, technology companies, contractors, design firms and local authorities will need to work together to attract people, develop expertise and create pathways into this industry. Europe already has examples we can learn from. In the Nordics, strong traditions of social partnership show how infrastructure investment can connect with local employment and economic development.
I believe workforce planning should start with the project itself. If we know a development will require significant numbers of people during construction, we can think upfront about how some of those skills transition into long-term careers operating and maintaining the infrastructure. There is a broader point here too that data centers consume land and power and with this communities will increasingly ask what they receive in return. Our industry needs to demonstrate that this infrastructure can also create skills, jobs, investment and lasting economic value. Being a good neighbor cannot be an afterthought. Building trust with local communities will be fundamental to the industry’s long-term ability to grow.
Looking ahead
The opportunity for Europe is significant but capturing it will require us to think differently.
We need to build faster without increasing risk, we need to connect energy, cooling and digital intelligence and we need to plan not only for today’s AI campuses, but for tomorrow’s modernization and Edge AI requirements. Finally, we need to make sure the communities hosting this infrastructure participate in the opportunity it creates.
AI is accelerating the data center industry. What excites me most is the opportunity to help shape what comes next. Explore how Schneider Electric helps enterprises build the resilient, efficient infrastructure needed to support AI at scale and access our guide AI Workload Deployment in Data Centers: Retrofit, Outsource or Build New?.
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