Market Trends of US Data Center Construction Industry
UPS Systems to Lead the Electrical Infrastructure Segment
- An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system is imperative for data centers to ensure that servers and all sensitive computing equipment are never susceptible to power line fluctuations and power quality issues. Any power failure can result in data center downtime, affecting the data center’s efficiency. UPS systems also assist in saving valuable data automatically during a power outage. On average, a UPS system offers backup for 8-10 minutes.
- Lately, the unfavorable weather conditions in the country have caused interruptions in data center operations. From January 2024 to March 2024, the country was hit by freezing weather, which affected the grid generation capacity and operating frequency of California and Texas. The disruption in the power supply led to issues with the state’s operation of data centers. The adoption of UPS systems results in mitigating such damages by weather changes. Various companies nationwide rely on data centers, which makes an uninterrupted power source crucial.
- There is a trend in adopting lithium-ion UPS systems in data centers due to several factors, such as longer life, small form factor, etc. The increasing consumption of energy by data centers in the country has been promoting the adoption of lithium-ion UPS systems.
- As per the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, while the hyperscalers typically need 10-14 kW per rack in existing data centers, this is likely to rise to 40-60 kW for AI-ready racks equipped with resource-equipped GPUs. This means that overall consumption of data centers across the United States is expected to reach 35 GW by 2030, up from 17 GW in 2022. Lithium-ion UPS systems are set to revolutionize UPS systems for large and micro data centers.
- The government has also been taking new initiatives toward energy consumption by data centers, triggering modular UPS systems. In the USD 2.3 trillion-backed Consolidated Appropriations Act 2021, the US government included data center energy efficiency targets and metrics. The act calls for a new study on energy and water consumption by data center use and ways to improve the efficiency of such data centers.
- The financial impact for data center management is also huge as a data center spends between 30% and 50% of its operational expenditure on electricity. According to the United States National Resources Defense Council, the combined electricity consumption capacity of data centers in Northern Virginia, United States, amounted to 2.6 GW in 2023, the highest globally. According to Cloudscene, the United States also has the largest number of data centers globally with 5381 currently ccompared to 5375 data centers in the previous year.
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Healthcare Sector to Witness Major Growth
- Digitization of consumer health records in the form of electronic medical records (EMR) has significantly contributed to massive data generation. The latest innovations in the medical equipment and the modernization of legacy operating systems, such as management of personnel and improvement in patient response systems, generate multitude of data, further boosting the demand for secured data centers.
- Technologies like IoT have a lot of applications in healthcare, from remote monitoring to medical device integration. It has also potential to keep patients healthy and safe and improve how physicians deliver care. However, a massive amount of data is being produced by sensors, wearables, remote monitors, and other medical devices.
- Telemedicine is increasing in usage in the United States, owing to various advantages, such as consumers from any region being able to gain access to required doctors. It is an efficient method, as both money and time are being saved due to the change in typically scheduled visits, thereby generating a lot of data and thus emphasizing the need for data centers and data center construction initiatives.
- As per the National Institutes of Health, between March 2020 and February 2022, more than 850,000 telemedicine visits occurred, with approximately 62% of visits by video and 38% by telephone. Besides, according to a survey of 398 healthcare professionals conducted by the Pharmaceutical Executive magazine, it has been predicted that after the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, almost 20% of patient appointments will still be conducted via telemedicine compared to 2% beforehand and 61% perhaps during the pandemic.
- At the technical level, advances in medical imaging and genomic research are introducing new types of file types that are larger in size. These factors contribute to the increasing amount of data in the healthcare industry, which boosts the data center construction developments in the region during the forecast period.
- Moreover, the government of the country continuously recognizes the role of digital health and technological innovation in healthcare as an integral part of successful healthcare infrastructure. The government is making significant strides to make the healthcare sector technologically advanced and continuously increasing its healthcare expenditure to support the healthcare sector. For instance, according to the data from CMS (Office of the Actuary), the forecasted U.S. national health expenditure was expected to reach USD 6.751 trillion in 2030 from USD 4.29 trillion in 2021.
