Data Centers Are Developing Best Practices for Construction

Data centers are a niche segment of the construction industry, but big things can come from small places. 

The data center sector has become a hothouse for innovative construction practices that have the potential to transform the entire industry.

Construction innovation thrives in the data center sector for several reasons. Data center companies, which are part of the tech industry, are known to embrace new technology and innovation. That is a key factor, but the biggest reason is the extraordinary demand for data centers, which requires them to be built at a breathtaking scale and speed.

The explosion of artificial intelligence, the ever-increasing demand for cloud computing and the exponential growth of data all require data centers as their indispensable infrastructure. That has led to high demand for the construction of new data centers — demand that represents hundreds of billions of dollars in investment.

With demand that high, data centers need to be built bigger and faster than ever before. And that necessity has been the mother of invention, making continuous innovation truly vital to this sector of the construction industry. Building data campuses this large, at lightning speed (while also ensuring quality, safety and sustainability) is only possible by rethinking every aspect of how we design, build and operate.

While we are applying these innovations to data centers specifically, they are just as relevant for the entire construction industry. Construction faces a perfect storm of challenges including rising demand, increasingly aggressive timelines, escalating workforce challenges, intensifying pressure on profits, increasing sustainability requirements and more.

To address these challenges, the entire industry must reconsider its approach to design and building. Developments in the data center sector offer a strong model for overcoming these obstacles.

My company, Compass Datacenters, is leading three crucial areas of innovation in the data center sector that can serve as best practices for the broader construction industry.
 

Stronger Together: The Importance of Closely Coupled Partnerships

In order to succeed in this industry, we must have a collaboration mindset for solving complex problems. Success rarely happens in a vacuum, and that is just as true for organizations as it is for individuals. Bringing together the expertise, creativity and problem-solving of multiple organizations is critical for addressing complex challenges like the ones the data center industry faces in building at unprecedented scale and speed.

This belief has led us to new types of supply chain contracts and enterprise agreements that enable more trust and transparency with our partners — behaviors that fuel the engines of innovation. This collaboration has birthed successful initiatives that have driven major advancements in construction, structural precast processes, power systems, cooling systems and other critical aspects of data center construction. One example is our partnership with Vertiv. Together, we jointly developed a hybrid cooling system (one of the most important components in data center construction) that solves technical challenges related to supporting AI computing. Another example is the collaboration with Coreslab, Shockey and Wells/Gate, which drove innovations in precast and prefabricated building systems that reduce embodied emissions from concrete and steel by 33%.

Too often, partnerships across the construction industry are transactional, not truly collaborative. By adopting a closely coupled supply chain model like the one we are using at Compass, our partners have scale. This gives the construction industry a stronger foundation for solving the biggest challenges we face not just in data centers, but in other building types as partners learn and invest.
 

The Future of Our Industry: Manufacturing Mindset & Practices

Another best practice from the data center sector is the adoption of the design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA) approach to construction. If you aren’t familiar with DfMA, it is a framework for designing components of a given end product with the intention of making manufacturing and assembly easier. It creates end products that are not only higher in quality, but also far more efficient to manufacture. The physical output of DfMA is manufactured products, including prefabricated assemblies like mechanical, electrical and skids; power center modules; and multitrade racks.

Every aspect of how we design, build and operate our data centers has been shaped by a commitment to prefabrication and continuous improvement. It goes beyond just a standard kit of parts to systems optimization. These manufacturing principles inform everything we do, leading to reduced waste and innovations and efficiencies that enable us to complete buildings in a fraction of the time it did just a few years ago.

These best practices are transforming the rest of the construction industry, helping to solve numerous challenges such as the skilled labor shortage, shrinking delivery timelines, increasing sustainability demands and more.

The Use of AI-Driven Analysis Will Be Transformative

The insights available to us today through AI and machine learning (ML) are mind-blowing, providing professionals in every sector with insights about their business that will be so compelling that they demand action. AI/ML are fueling a massive wave of innovation at Compass, enabling us to supercharge our commitment to continuous improvement. The ways that the data center construction sector is using AI are a model for how it can be adopted in impactful ways across the industry.

We use AI-driven insights to improve every step of designing, building and operating our data centers. By working with our partners, we share data that leads to major advancements in cooling and power systems. Today’s AI insights are greatly accelerating our capacity to generate, test and identify successful innovations, streamlining the entire journey from ideation to piloting to adoption.

The success we have already had with AI/ML serves as a guide for how other organizations in the construction industry and beyond can drive innovation and continuous improvement. In order to do that, it is critical that more aspects of business are digitized. Although this presents a challenge, the exciting thing is that the progress and benefits we have already seen so far from AI/ML are only the beginning of what is possible. Digitizing systems across your operations and exposing that data to AI/ML will undoubtedly provide you with insights that will allow your business to transform for the better.

Leading the Way

The data center construction industry has the unique challenge of rising to meet our society’s explosion in demand for compute power. But instead of looking at this as a problem, we can choose to see this as an opportunity to blaze the trail for what the next generation of construction practices will look like.

Through innovating at every juncture, from the way we work with our strategic partners, to our adoption of more efficient construction practices, to digitizing our business’s data so that AI/ML can streamline and accelerate success, data center construction will continue to lead the industry path to innovation. And although the data center building boom may not be touching your construction business, we are confident that these innovation strategies will be valuable to your success as we look to the future of our exciting industry.