It Always Comes Down to Power

It is hard to believe, but there is a significant amount of megawatts that goes unused in global data centers. On this episode of the Not Your Father's Data Center Podcast, Host Raymond Hawkins of Compass Data Centers talked with Dean Nelson, the CEO of Virtual Power Systems.

Nelson talked about his work at Uber and Sun Systems. This led down the path of Nelson's work at Virtual Power Systems, where they "believe that digital infrastructure is the foundation for an equitable and inclusive world, where every person on the planet participates in the digital economy."

In acting upon this vision, VPS unlocks stranded power in data centers.

What's staggering to Nelson – and why he thinks this is such important work – is that, through research, VPS found 35,000 megawatts of capacity globally in the data center industry. They checked this data through multiple vectors. Of the capacity, 10,000 megawatts are stranded. This leads to a host of issues, one of which is increasing the carbon footprint unnecessarily.

"How much embedded carbon do we add every time we perpetuate that problem and build another data center that's 50% utilized?," Nelson asked.

The goal through technology at Virtual Power Systems is to utilize this space. Data centers build such an extensive infrastructure with low utilization to make headroom and safety create into the center. They want to make sure they have the buffer room when things don't go right in the system.

"It's the cumulative effect of everyone's buffer," Hawkins said, referring to the sheer amount of space unused.