For a data center, power is fundamental to what we build and the products we serve. After all, all bits of data are just simply electrons of electricity. Electricity is so fundamental to what a data center is that it is time that we consider it as part of the service and the key solutions that we provide. Self-powering data centers is akin to my memories of 25 years ago when I was working at Exodus Communications—the largest data center provider supporting over a third of the internet—that did not want to own their own buildings. They let somebody else own the building because they thought it was not core to their business. Imagine loosing control of the building your data center resides in? Self-powering our data centers is also a transition that started exactly 20 years ago when I worked at Google on a small team working to own and operate our own data centers for the many cost, efficiency, control of schedule, and ability to utilize new technologies and approaches as well as lower cost locations with power solutions to grow to scales unknown at the time. Google and its investors realized the benefits and owning their own data center and power solutions 20 years ago. A few years later, I was part of a team and then led for Yahoo the development of it’s own data centers—self-designed, built and operated specifically for the at the time the largest Internet property and what was a very sizable multi-billion dollar a year build out budget because the company realized that it was much more cost-effective and provided so many other benefits such as testing new technologies in both IT and infrastructure such as liquid cooling. Building, owning and operating company-owned data centers has become so de facto for the hyperscalers that just in one quarter this year just four of the hyperscalers spent over $50 billion on data center infrastructure. Think about that: just four companies and in just one quarter—a period of only three months—spent over $50 billion to build own and operate their own data centers. What a transition from a thought that they should not own and operate them because they are not core to their business. Well do you think data centers are not core to the businesses we support and their online services and operations? Do you think that power is not core to providing these online services?
While even every hyperscaler cannot own and operate all of their own data centers because of scale and speed and other resources, power is so fundamental to whether we own or lease a data center and the services it can provide. Just the same as people in our industry didn’t want to own the building, or the data center, I now see the same with the power that makes the data center active. Much the same as the benefits in owning the building and a company self-owning and operating their data center, the benefits of self-owning and controlling the power to meet the speed, scale, and have control of the emissions and costs, these transitions take time but I see self-providing power as so fundamental and with so many benefits that it will be become an absolute consideration and of strategic value and importance within the next 1-3 years. The benefits in cost, speed, schedule control, project value and de-risking are so tremendous that not at least considering it for every project will limit and add risks to growth.
I’ve been part of so many projects recently in which the electric utility could provide zero to 100 MWs of capacity over the next few years to a decade while a self-generation solution could provide hundreds of MWs in as fast or faster than we could build the first building, so it’s a solution that adds billions of dollars in revenue and does so faster. And to the surprise of many, when done well can lower energy cost, have parity to lower emissions than the electric utility, certainly have far higher net electrical efficiency, the same or smaller footprint than utility substations, and certainly faster in most locations and with known and controllable schedule risks.
Just as we as an industry have progressed from conventional thinking about the real estate and ownership of data centers and the location of data centers, it is time that we start integrating in our own power sources that provide the actual electrons that move the bits and bytes of data within our data centers and out to the users of the services that we provide. For without those electrons we are nothing but a very expensive warehouse and cannot provide those Internet services that are becoming so fundamental to everything we do as a society today and it’s not just what we do as a society today but it’s also how we make things so much more efficient in our society from the simple tasks we do online all day long and the efficiencies that these services provide.
I will dive more into this topic and the benefits and reasons to wholeheartedly and always look to self-generation solutions, including of course emissions reductions, and the technologies and options to do this today and at speed and scale. The solutions that I’ve been working on are already serving large operational data centers. I look forward to sharing more in future posts and helping to manifest what I believe will be the greatest transition of our industry in both value and benefits.
