Huawei Digital Power Targets AI-Driven Data Centre Boom

As businesses and consumers increasingly rely on digital services, the need for robust, efficient and sustainable data centre infrastructure has never been more critical.

Huawei Digital Power, a business unit of technology conglomerate Huawei, has strongly positioned itself to capitalise on the rapid growth in data centre demand driven by cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI).

With over three decades of experience in the mission-critical infrastructure industry, Sanjay Kumar Sainani, Global CTO and SVP of Business Development for Data Centers at Huawei Digital Power, brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. Here, he outlines the company’s strategy to address the challenges posed by this surge in demand.

Cloud and AI driving unprecedented growth

The cloud services market is experiencing explosive growth, growing at 23% year on year and expected to touch US$700 billion, driven by businesses migrating their operations to the cloud to improve scalability, reduce costs and enhance flexibility.

Perhaps even more striking is the projected growth of the AI market. Valued at US$40 billion in 2022, it is forecast to balloon to US$1.3 trillion over the next decade. This exponential growth reflects the increasing adoption of AI technologies across various sectors, from healthcare and finance to manufacturing and retail.

“This growth is supported by multiple billion-dollar investments from players like Microsoft, AWS, TikTok, Huawei and driven by investments by asset companies including BlackStone and KKR ” Sanjay explains. The geographical distribution of this market is significant, with approximately 50% in the United States and 27% in the Asia-Pacific region, including China.

This surge in cloud and AI services is also driving a corresponding increase in power consumption. “Power consumption in this space is expected to double from 55GW to 100KGW in the next 4-5 years,” says Sanjay.

Challenges in the new data centre era

The rapid growth in data centre demand presents several interconnected challenges. Sanjay identifies three key areas that require innovative solutions:

The first is the issue of energy availability and carbon footprints. The deployment of large data centre campuses, some consuming hundreds of megawatts of power, is putting unprecedented strain on energy providers. “Energy companies are finding it difficult to provide power to these data centre campuses,” Sanjay notes. This challenge is compounded by the increasing pressure to generate renewable power to meet CO2 emission goals, driving up investments in green energy.

The next issue is rack density and cooling demand. The power density requirements of AI and machine learning workloads are pushing the limits of traditional data centre designs. “Cloud infrastructure is averaging out at about 8-12KW per cabinet,” Sanjay explains. “However, AI/LLM training DCs using parallel processing compute start from 40KW and expectations are of 100-200KW per cabinet in the near future.”

This dramatic increase in power density presents significant cooling challenges. Traditional air-cooling systems are inadequate for these high-density racks, necessitating the development of new cooling technologies.

The third challenge is time to market and supply chain. The industry faces immense pressure to deliver new capacity quickly to meet the surging demand. “All of this demand with its challenges is required to be delivered at warp speed,” says Sanjay. This necessitates a global supply chain and solutions that can be standardised and modularised to be deployed at scale in the shortest possible time.

Huawei’s approach to sustainability

Huawei Digital Power is addressing these challenges through an approach that combines renewable energy solutions, modular data centre designs and advanced cooling technologies.

The company’s renewable energy offerings include grid-scale string inverters, which convert direct current from solar panels to alternating current for the grid. These inverters are a crucial component in large-scale solar installations, helping to make renewable energy more efficient and cost-effective.

“These, coupled with Battery Energy Storage Systems from Huawei, allow grids to regulate the quality of the grid as well in certain scenarios allow for peak shaving, allowing breathing space to over-loaded grids and smart energy cost-management,” Sanjay explains. These systems help to balance the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources, storing excess energy during peak production times and releasing it when demand is high.

In the data centre space, Huawei has developed several innovative solutions to improve efficiency and reduce environmental impact. One such solution is the Power-POD, a modular system that integrates the complete electrical power infrastructure. “This allows our customers, which include Hyper-scalers and Colocation players, to rapidly deploy  MW-scale data centre facilities,” says Sanjay.

The Power-POD incorporates high-efficiency modular Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems with Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries, known for their long lifespan and safety characteristics.

Cooling innovation a critical factor

Cooling is perhaps the most critical challenge for high-density AI workloads. Traditional air-cooling systems can struggle to dissipate the heat generated by densely packed, high-performance computing equipment efficiently.

To address this, Huawei has deployed new cooling architectures, including advanced liquid cooling solutions. “Huawei has worked with hyperscalers to develop reference architectures to cater to the new requirements of liquid cooling in data centres,” Sanjay explains. These solutions include innovations in hybrid cooling systems, heat exchangers and cooling distribution units (CDUs).

Liquid cooling, which involves circulating a liquid coolant directly over or very close to heat-generating components, is also more efficient and effective at heat removal than air cooling. This becomes crucial as rack densities increase, allowing data centres to pack more computing power into a smaller footprint while managing thermal loads effectively.

Beyond removing heat, Huawei is exploring innovative ways to reuse it, turning what was once considered waste into a valuable resource. “Huawei, with its ecosystem partners, is currently engaged in projects collaborating with local governments and utilities to integrate data centre heat into municipal heating systems,” says Sanjay.

This approach aligns with circular economy principles, where waste from one process becomes an input for another. By capturing and reusing the heat generated by data centres, these projects can significantly reduce overall energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

The technical challenges of heat reuse are considerable, requiring advanced heat capture and transfer systems. To combat these challenges, Huawei is leveraging its expertise in liquid cooling technology and AI-driven energy management systems to develop tailored solutions for different scenarios.

Modular data centre design

Huawei has become a major provider of pre-fabricated data centres globally, an approach that offers significant advantages in terms of speed of deployment and sustainability.

“We are able to deploy data centres in tens of MW in less than 12-14 months including design, construction, testing and commissioning,” Sanjay states. This rapid deployment is crucial in an industry where time-to-market can be a critical competitive advantage.

The modular approach involves manufacturing standardised components in a factory setting, which are then assembled on-site. This method offers several benefits:

1. Quality control: Factory manufacturing allows for tighter quality control compared to on-site construction.

2. Reduced waste: Standardisation and controlled manufacturing processes result in less material waste.

3. Flexibility: Modular designs can be more easily scaled or reconfigured as needs change.

4. Sustainability: The use of prefabricated components often allows for more sustainable building materials and reduces the carbon footprint associated with construction.

The company’s offerings include prefabricated, pre-fitted modules for various data centre sub-systems, including power infrastructure, cooling infrastructure, data halls, corridors and common areas. This comprehensive approach allows for a high degree of customisation while maintaining the benefits of standardisation.

“Standardisation and productisation of pre-fab, pre-fitted build solutions allows the use of low carbon building material and less wastage of construction material driving green and sustainable construction,” Sanjay explains.

Partnership strategy: An ecosystem approach

Recognising that no single company can provide all the solutions, Huawei has developed an extensive ecosystem of partners. These partnerships span various specialties, including engineering firms, equipment suppliers for high, medium and low voltage systems, mechanical cooling systems providers and civil and MEP (Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing) construction companies.

These partnerships allow Huawei to offer comprehensive, end-to-end solutions that address all aspects of data centre design, construction and operation. By leveraging the expertise of various specialists, the company can deliver more innovative and efficient solutions than would be possible working in isolation.

One key partnership highlighted by Sanjay is with Cummins, a leading manufacturer of power generation equipment. This collaboration focuses on developing more sustainable backup power solutions for data centres. 

“Cummins has been a key strategic partner to Huawei for our data centre business and they offer a wide range of back-up power systems across multiple countries,” says Sanjay. “Like Huawei, they are well adapted and positioned to offer life-cycle services to ensure availability of the back-up power generators.

“We have also been exploring with Cummins alternate fuel back-up power generators to provide solutions that would help reduce operational carbon footprint.”

Future trends: The road ahead

Looking to the future, Sanjay anticipates several key trends that will shape the data centre industry in the coming years.

“Alternate energy sources will be required to cater to the huge demand, resulting in more investments for new energy sources including small modular reactors (SMRs),” he predicts, reflecting the growing need for reliable, scalable and low-carbon energy sources to power the expanding data centre industry.

Sanjay also expects to see more stringent regulations around data centre energy and water consumption, as well as carbon emissions, which will likely drive further innovations in efficiency and sustainability.

“Increased embedded AI will also increase rack density in cloud and edge for inferencing,” Sanjay notes, in a trend which will continue to push the boundaries of cooling and power distribution technologies.

He also anticipates the establishment of data centre zones to better facilitate circular energy principles including heat capture and heat re-use: a concept which envisions purpose-built areas where data centres can be clustered to maximise energy efficiency and enable large-scale heat reuse schemes.

As the data centre industry continues to evolve, companies like Huawei Digital Power are at the forefront of developing the technologies and strategies needed to meet the dual challenges of explosive growth and environmental sustainability.

"The next 12-18 months will be characterised by massive demand for data centre infrastructure and thus power demand,” Sanjay concludes. “There will be expectations to build faster, greener and more reliable/available data centers. We anticipate standardisation work for liquid cooled cabinets and 100-200KW per cabinet. And we also expect to see new power and cooling architectures from chip to cabinet to building to campus to handle the scale and flexibility of these ultra-dense data centres.”

Make sure you check out the latest edition of DataCentre Magazine and also sign up to our global conference series - Data Centre LIVE 2025

DataCentre Magazine is a BizClik brand