Hans Obermillacher, Business Development Manager for Data Centre Infrastructure at Panduit, has spent around 25 years in the data centre market and seen his fair share of change. He discusses the shift to AI-scale power and cooling, the rise of Edge facilities and why a transition in power distribution is on the horizon.
What has been the biggest shift in the infrastructure market over the last 10 years – has anything surprised you?
There are three major shifts we’ve experienced, one being a power shift. Looking back 20 years, we saw power consumption of 1kW per cabinet. We didn’t talk too much about cooling per cabinet, so on-chip cooling wasn’t a big topic and there was no need for a hybrid cooling approach, involving Room cooling, Containment cooling and D2C (Direct to Chip).
If we look at power consumption of a cabinet today, we’re referring to AI power consumption. The lowest power consumption per cabinet is 40-50 kW and the future is around 500 kW+ per cabinet. That requires a totally different cooling approach: it’s on-chip cooling, it’s liquid-based rear door heat exchanger cooling, it’s not only air cooling anymore. This is a tremendous shift from a power and cooling perspective which wasn’t a surprise, but it took a little longer than expected.
Another shift is that we used to see enterprises deploying their own data centres, buying cabinets, deploying PDUs and all the necessary hardware themselves. Today’s MTDC’s (Multi-Tenant Data Centres) where Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) means all the compute infrastructure is owned by a service provider and contracted to the user customers/clients, so the client owns the data and none of the equipment. A client doesn’t own a cabinet, server, UPS, or storage system.
The third is Edge Computing where the customer has the computing capacity close to the point of activity. This is becoming a typical deployment for banks, supermarkets and transportation companies. If we consider autonomous driving, there isn’t time to send all the data back and forth – the bandwidth may not be sufficient and the latency too high. The data centre as a hub where computing happens is becoming a more distributed environment known as Edge Computing.
Can you give an example of a project where Panduit’s infrastructure had to keep up with AI demand?
We’re looking into AI deployments and have a very healthy sales funnel there. We speak with system integrators, server companies and with NVIDIA. Panduit published a structured cabling guide together with NVIDIA.
The Panduit NVIDIA AI Structured Cabling Reference Architecture Guide provides technical blueprint designs to support the massive data requirements and high-density connectivity of NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD systems (including H100, H200 and Blackwell-based architectures).
What do you think will be the next requirement for data centres?
Power distribution will change from a standard power distribution unit supplying up to 55kW based on 125 A, driven by the rise of (Generative) AI, heavily impacting the power architecture.
We’ll soon be talking about 800 volts, which is massive amounts of power distribution based on a power bar at the back of the cabinet.
How will your products adapt and keep pace with this transformation?
Panduit’s R&D department is based in Chicago, with almost 300 R&D engineers as my colleagues who are constantly exploring future infrastructure designs and requirements.
Panduit invests 4-5% of revenue in R&D and has 19 laboratories looking into fibre connectivity, power, cooling, cabinet and cable management needs.
There are a variety of Panduit developments I’m looking forward to in 2027. As in recent years, we totally reimagined our PDU offering. The EL2P Series combines reliable rack power distribution with intelligent monitoring and management and combo-outlets. Furthermore, it provides visibility into how much power each rack is consuming, helps identify capacity and energy issues and allows centralised management. It is designed for high-density racks, with strong cybersecurity and integration capabilities. Panduit continues to invest in product development and manufacturing in locations strategic to our markets.
