AI-Driven Data Center Development Expert

• “Power availability is both the greatest enabler and disabler in data center development today and for the foreseeable,” says Bill Mazzetti, Senior Vice President, Rosendin Electric.
• “Time will tell whether we’ve overbuilt in the short term, hit the sweet spot between data center megawatt (MW) needs and AI demand, or if we’re still short,” Bill Mazzetti explains.

Qualified with over 40 years in the data center industry, Bill Mazzetti, Senior Vice President of US electrical contractor, Rosendin Electric, provides a unique insight into the sector’s current and future developments, and its confluence with artificial intelligence.

Firstly, what is your take on the current uptick in data center development and how long do you think this will continue?

Bill Mazzetti , Senior Vice President (BM): That’s what everyone is asking us these days! When you look at both the backlog and recent quarterly calls from hyperscale data centers, everyone is showing robust expenditure for the next three years. All reports indicate that there will be no break in capital expenditure (Cap Ex) for the foreseeable.

The recent Deep Seek announcement, for instance, really set everything off as many industry players see the company as an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that is not only useful but represents an improvement to Rev.ai, a speech recognition AI platform, and a new look for the large language model (LLM) stack.

However, it doesn’t break the dynamic shift that the computer industry is experiencing from central processing units (CPU) to graphics processing units (GPU).

The announcement also caused a lot of turmoil, but we believe this enables a greater commoditization of AI services. Historically, when commoditization in the technology sector arrives, it actually drives greater demand and further growth, contrary to most industries.

Our clients are certainly voting with their feet and checkbooks right now. We anticipate them doing so for the next several quarters, so we’re optimistic through to 2029.

We don’t see the “crazy busy forever” trend as indefinite, but we feel that this robust build cycle will continue for the next six years, or two complete leasing, procurement, and development cycles. This will allow hardware and facility deployments to catch up with application usage and the resulting revenue.

Time will tell whether we’ve overbuilt in the short term, hit the sweet spot between data center megawatt (MW) needs and AI demand, or if we’re still short. If you listen to recent interviews from leadership at social media conglomerate Meta and US AI organization OpenAI, it reinforces this opinion.

Some of us at Rosendin Electric are contrarians as we feel there’s a confluence of several factors that could affect facility deployments.

First, the industry can’t keep going at this pace indefinitely; we have all been caught up in the “get it at all costs” AI arms race for the past two years.

Eventually, tech does what tech firms do – it makes things more efficient, drive their customization to a commoditized level, set reference designs and procurement pipelines for their particular business, and drive both adoption and lower costs.

Evidently, none of our clients’ medium to long-term development forecasts have changed after the announcement.

When you look back at the history of the cloud business, there is a precedent. We’re seeing how the next generation of technology is going and how it advances organically, as evidenced by the fact the growth of cloud environments in the past decade has not been linear.

AI is a hardware-centric world where the hardware, operating systems, network, and applications are more homogeneous and similar to the mainframe technology seen in the 1990s.

This is contrary to the heterogeneous cloud reality of blended best-in-class and vertically integrated hardware, software, applications, and networks defined by the end user. It’s basically a major change to known design form factors, or at worst, massive revisions to existing facilities.

Deep Seek might require lower MW and time needs, but it does not decrease the overall need for AI…