Dive Brief:
- JLL, Lumen Technologies and Schneider Electric are teaming up to offer modular data centers to customers across the U.S.
- As part of the collaboration, JLL will identify and select sites, including approximately 5,000 sites across Lumen’s fiber network. Schneider Electric will bring its expertise in design and construction, with the partnership aiming to roll out ready-to-use modular data centers within six to nine months, JLL said in a Tuesday release.
- The partners aim to more quickly deploy, adapt and scale data centers — at a lower cost — to meet rapidly growing demand from artificial intelligence, internet-of-things and other technologies, JLL said.
Dive Insight:
According to JLL’s H1 2023 North American Data Center Report, the U.S. saw record demand for data centers, with hyperscalers, financial services firms, healthcare organizations and other large enterprises “scrambling to secure data center space.” Growth is expected to continue, according to research by Synergy Research Group, which projected that hyperscaler data center capacity will nearly triple by 2029. While capacity was already on track to steadily increase, the anticipated jump in high-intensity generative AI workloads is driving additional demand, Synergy said.
Because most of the 2023 and 2024 supply has already been pre-leased or is under exclusivity, operators must “employ creative solutions — like modular data centers — capable of being rapidly installed, deployed on an accelerated timeline and with IoT adaptability,” JLL says.
JLL says that the modular approach significantly shrinks deployment times compared with traditional data center builds and allows the construction of data centers that are closer to end users. Modularity also helps companies more easily solve scalability and deployment challenges, it says.
“What modular data centers do is they enable you to build a data center that’s close enough to the metropolis but not bound by the requirement to have a large land area,” Vlad Galabov, head of cloud and data center research practice at Omdia, told DataCenter Knowledge.
