By 2030, more than 8,370 data centers will be in operation worldwide. To put that in perspective, in 2023 there were 5,306. And not only that, they’re getting bigger. Large and mega-sized data centers will account for 43 percent of all sites by the end of the decade, up from 28 percent in 2025. Companies are investing billions. Decisions about how best to do so have big consequences.
In a young, highly competitive industry with tremendous potential, it can be tempting to over-rotate on the proprietary at the expense of the expedient to gain a longer-term market advantage. While there is merit in fending off fast followers who would usurp groundbreaking intellectual property, for data center operators, the money’s in the compute — and the longer it takes to fully deploy a facility, the more distant profitability grows. They must weigh the potential gains of bespoke technologies against the opportunity lost waiting for uptime. Modular systems get them from build to compute a lot faster.
Keeping pace with demand requires data center operators to streamline and expedite infrastructure deployment wherever possible. Forging collaborative, mutually beneficial relationships has taken on a new sense of urgency as industry players compete for relevance, dominance, and revenue in a rapidly evolving market. Often, these collaborations are aimed at developing prefabricated, modular solutions that integrate an array of products into scalable units that make it much easier to stand up, retrofit, reconfigure, and maintain data center infrastructure, from power and cooling systems to the megawatt racks running AI workloads.