 |
|
|
|||||
For all the industries that are facing existential crises from the emergence of artificial intelligence, one is seeing a happily profitable outcome. Architects are increasingly being commissioned to design the brick-and-mortar infrastructure supporting the AI boom. These data centersbig warehouse-like buildings stuffed with whirring servers sucking up hundreds of megawatts of powerare becoming a major, and majorly lucrative, part of the architecture industry’s bottom line. We’ve got about 200 people working strictly on data center projects, says Joy Hughes, a design manager at the architecture and design firm Gensler. It’s a subset of the architecture business that has surged in recent years. During the Covid pandemic, the demand for cloud-based online services from Zoom calls to streaming movies caused a spike in data center construction. Now we’re seeing another jump in growth because of AI and machine learning coming on board, Hughes says. Gensler, which has more than 6,000 employees in 57 offices worldwide, has seen its data center business skyrocket. The practice area is up 87% year over year from 2023, and the firm is projecting a growth of 40% for 2025. Gensler is not alone. Many other architecture firms, both big and small, are seeing data center work drive significant revenues. More than a dozen firms pulled in $1 million or more in data center revenue in 2023, according to Building Design + Construction’s annual list of architecture firm revenue. Ten firms earned more than $20 million in data center-related revenue in 2023. Third-ranked Gensler’s take was more than $69 million; Corgan, at the top of the list, raked in $135 million. Gabe Clark, data centers sector leader for Corgan, says the firm has been designing data centers for more than 15 years and anticipates year-over-year growth for at least the next five years. We started executing one megawatt builds. We’re now designing now one gigawatt campuses, he says. There’s truly exponential growth in the marketplace, both in advancement of what data center design is and clearly in the need and the demand. And we don’t see that slowing down anytime soon. The story behind these staggering figures is a simple one of demand. A recent report from McKinsey estimates that global demand for data center capacity could rise at an annual rate of between 19 and 22% through 2030. For architecture firms, that’s a steady pipeline of new projects for years to come. Under construction data centers are expected to reach record highs in 2025. Demand for modern data center facilities continues to soar, says Gordon Dolven, director of Americas data center research at the commercial real estate advisory CBRE. Databank Atlanta [Photo: courtesy of Gensler] Data center design evolves This boom is opening up new avenues for design. It’s an unexpected evolution for a very utilitarian building typology, which usually consists of a big warehouse with a few offices tucked in a corner and the majority of the space filled with precise rows of server racks. Gensler’s Hughes, who started her career with the firm doing IT work, has spent a lot of time in data centers and knows that their design is rarely the first priority. When I walked into my first data center, there were no windows. You are walking into a concrete box, she says. A big gray box, sitting out in a corn field or a potato field or whatever. It wasn’t even painted. It was very, very nebulous. But this is beginning to change, for reasons ranging from location to environmental concern to the availability of power. Hughes says some of Gensler’s large data center projects are being developed in a wide range of places, including the remote greenfields of the past as well as more suburban areas closer to end users. These data centers, often covering hundreds of acres, are becoming a bit more sensitive to their surroundings. Hughes says Gensler’s designers are adding public-facing amenities to them, like hiking trails and open spaces, to soften their edges and reduce the negative visual impact on communities. This is especially relevant for those data centers with their own power supplies, which often require large industrial infrastructure, substations, and power lines that can take up significant amounts of land. We’ll probably start to see a lot more of that as on-site generation starts to take shape here in the U.S., especially in some of those more suburban and urban locations where we’re seeing some of these pop up, she says. Databank Atlanta [Photo: courtesy of Gensler] Some data centers are even being built right within the footprint of existing office complexes. Gensler completed a project in midtown Atlanta in 2019 that’s nestled in a mixed use commercial development at Georgia Tech, providing data hall space for the university as well as leasable data center facilities for private sector clients such as the aerospace, security, and defense companies located in the area. These types of data centers tend to be smaller, more compact, so they can fit within an office building, they can fit within an urban space, Hughes says. Comarch [Photo: courtesy of Gensler] The overall look of data centers is also undergoing a change. One Gensler-designed project for the IT company Comarch is located in Mesa, Arizona, and the 50,000-square-foot building was designed to include a welcoming front-of-house area for the center’s staff, with lounge seating and informal meeting areas drenched in daylight. You have floor-to-ceiling glass, you have all of this natural light, and you have all of these views out into the desert, she says. We design these buildings for computers, but we have to remember that even though there’s not a lot of people in them, there are still people in them. We still have to design for those people. Environmental concerns are also affecting the way data centers are designed. Clark says Corgan’s wide range of data center projects are becoming increasingly focused on reducing not only their surging operational energy consumption but also the environmental footprint of the buildings themselves. Lower carbon materials, like mass timber, are becoming more common, as is insulation that allows for the buildings to be cooled more efficiently. We have seen tremendously more opportunities over the last five years to work with clients to enhance their building image, both purely aesthetically, but also from a sustainability perspective, Clark says. There’s also a lot of eyes on data centers out in the world these days and knowing that these facilities are being built and powered in the most sustainable way possible is becoming more and more critical to our clients. This kind of design thinking is also happening at a more abstract level. Goodman Group, a global data center operator recently announced a partnership with Oxman, designer Neri Oxman’s interdisciplinary innovation lab, to reinvent its building practices. The partnership is focused on developing practices that maximize the ecological presence and utility of the built environment. Microsoft [Photo: courtesy of Gensler] Land and power With such high demand for data centers, some of these concerns are pushed aside. Many data center developers and hyperscaler data center owner-operators like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services can’t build data centers fast enough. Data center operators are willing to pay a pretty penny to get these up to meet demand, so getting them up quickly is really important, says Jennie Karnes, a vice president in the Data Center Solutions group at CBRE. Access to power is the primary parameter guiding the location, size, and design of data centers, according to Karnes, and that’s led to a variety of approaches. Some operators are buying up sites that can easily latch into the electricity grid, while others are building facilities that have their own substations and power sources, including solar arrays, wind turbines, and natural gas. Some are being considered for construction on the sites of shuttered coal power plants, and others are looking at getting permitted for nuclear small module reactors. Karnes says that even though the power demands of data centers are growingmany are being designed to accommodate hundreds of megawatts of demand per hourthe size of the actual data halls in these facilities is remaining relatively stable. New chips, graphics processing units (GPUs), and improved cooling techniques means that the cabinets of servers inside a data center can operate at much higher power densities. The same cabinet that used to take five kilowatts of power, now we’re looking at designing it to support 100 to 250 kilowatts of power. So 20 to 50 times what we saw five years ago, Karnes says. That’s leading some data center racks to grow in height, raising ceilings in new builds to upwards of 16 feet. AI is driving much of this increased energy demand. And the higher the power density of a server rack, the more cooling it requires. Clark says that the AI boom is leading data center developers to integrate new approaches for cooling, and that additional mechanical equipment means data center facilities are requiring more space than in the recent past. Clark says data centers built primarily to support cloud services just a few years ago could often fit all of this attendant mechanical equipment on their roofs. Now, with AI in the mix, data centers have to have additional square footage outside the building. All of the mechanical and electrical infrastructure to support that same footprint of data module or data hall has now, in some cases, doubled, Clark says. Some of the concern around electricity demand may be tempered by the recent release of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that built state-of-the-art model using a midrange type of computer chip. Because these chips can run using less energy, some have questioned whether data center energy demand will remain so high. But given the growth of AI, more efficient chip utilization isn’t likely to cause the size of data centers to go down, nor to reduce the demand for new facilities. Big boxes will still be built out in empty fields, and many are under construction now. Stargate, a joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle, plans to feed AI’s demand by building up to $500 billion worth of large data centers in the coming years. One of Stargate’s first announced data center projects is a 1.2-gigawatt facility being built on more than 1,100 acres in Abilene, Texas. In terms of the form and size of data center designs, there’s no real model to follow. If you look back even four years ago when everything was cloud-based, the market had kind of gelled around a program, Clark says. Generally, they were pretty homogeneous at the end of the day. What’s going on in the world now in regard to designing around AI, it’s a little bit of the Wild West. Everybody’s still trying to find what is the best approach. [Photo: courtesy Lonestar Data Holdings] To the moon Some are looking far beyond the Wild West. Lonestar Data Holdings is a backup data storage provider that has developed a novel type of extraterritorial data center that are designed to operate beyond the surface of the earth. Its newest data center is the Future Payload, a solar-powered eight terabyte data backup device that will be part of a lunar lander mission launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in late February. Lonestar calls it the first data center to be sent to space. More prototype than product, it is designed to operate from the surface of the moon for a single lunar day, just 14 days here on Earth. Even this niche of the data center business is proving to be a boon to the architecture industry. Lonestar commissioned the architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) to design the data center. The device, which measures just 10 by 7 inches will be attached to the side of Athena, a lander developed by Intuitive Machines through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. A thin 3D printed device, it was designed to cast shadows of the silhouettes of the faces of two NASA astronauts as the sun passes overhead. BIG designs the future I want to live in. The future I thought I’d be living in. The future we’re working to build, Lonestar CEO Chris Stott tells Fast Company by email. The Freedom Payload is meant to be a symbol for all of humanity, a beacon of hope to the world as we strive towards that better future. Compared to terrestrial data centers that can stretch across hundreds of acres and draw hundreds of megawatts of electricity around the clock, this lunar data center is a proof of concept both quaint and complex. But just like its counterparts whirring away on earth, the data center that could soon be running on the moon is the result of a significant amount of design and consideration. “As we prepare to return to the Moon to stay, it is important that everything we do these coming years of lunar settlement is done with intention and care,” says Bjarke Ingels, BIG founder and creative director. “Even if modest in scale, this data center is one of very few artifacts designed to remain part of the lunar landscape for years to come.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Jane, a vice president of Human Resources at a growing tech company, often found herself overwhelmed by her team’s reliance on her. Because her job required her to manage a flat, decentralized organization with a mix of senior managers, rising leaders, and embedded HR personnel within the product business units, she was frequently the go-to person for problem-solving. One particularly hectic week, she skipped lunch for three days. Despite her exhaustion, she agreed to a last-minute meeting late in the day before heading out to her daughters soccer match. When her direct report, Jesse, presented a complex issue, Jane, feeling pressed for time, interrupted: I do not have time for this. Come back tomorrow with your recommendations. Her response was understandable, but it inadvertently reinforced a culture of dependency, which leaves her team reliant on her and stalling their growth in the process. Janes experience highlights a common challenge for leaders in flat organizationsbalancing immediate demands while fostering team independence. Overcoming this requires intentional strategies to build autonomy, resilience, and self-reliance within teams. Below are some of the common reasons that explain why organizations create dependency. The need to control outcomes Leaders often hesitate to delegate because theyre worried that their team will make mistakes or cant handle complex challenges. While this need for control is understandable, it can hinder team growth and create a bottleneck. This leaves leaders overwhelmed and can leave their teams feeling disempowered. Gallups State of the Global Workplace 2024 Report shows that 70% of variance in team engagement depends on managers, underscoring the importance of empowering leadership behaviors. Lack of trust in the team A lack of trust in team members skills or judgment can lead to micromanagement. While the leader might take this approach to reduce risks, this deprives the team of learning opportunities, and reinforces reliance on the leader. Inadequate training or clarity on roles According to Gallup’s 2025 US Engagement research, only 46% of employees clearly understand what is expected of them at worka significant drop from 56% in March 2020. This uncertainty fosters disengagement and diminishes accountability. When team members lack the necessary training or clearly defined responsibilities, theyre less likely to be proactive and act independently. Without a structured decision-making framework, even skilled employees avoid taking risks. They perceive mistakes as failures, rather than growth opportunities. Strategies for addressing dependency Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report highlights a significant disconnect: 89% of executives believe they are promoting human sustainability, but only 41% of employees share this view. This underscores the importance of investing in workforce development to build trust, enhance engagement, and align with organizational goals. Managers need to foster independence by training direct reports to be self-sufficient problem-solvers. Leaders should also drive growth by cultivating critical thinking and self-reliance, empowering teams and ensuring long-term success. 1. Adopt a coaching mindset Leaders should shift from solving problems to guiding their teams to find solutions. Thus, encouraging greater accountability. One effective technique is the Socratic Method, which uses open-ended questions to explore perspectives, clarify concepts, and challenge assumptions. This approach encourages a discovery process and an experimentation mindset, countering the rigidity of a fixed mindset that views mistakes as failures rather than opportunities for growth. For example, managers ask questions like, What steps have you already taken? or What options are you considering? The GROW model also offers a structured approach to fostering critical thinking and self-reliance. It stands for the following: Goal setting: What do you want to achieve? Reality assessment: What is the current situation? Options generation: What possible strategies can you pursue? Way forward: What specific actions will you take? By utilizing these methods, team members gain on-the-job experience and develop confidence and skills over time. 2. Clarify roles and decision protocols Ambiguity in roles often leads to unnecessary escalation. Establishing clear expectations about when and how to escalate issues can address this challenge. For example, leaders might require team members to conduct stakeholder analyses or gather key insights before seeking guidance. McKinseys DARE decision-making model offers a structured approach to clarify roles and responsibilities, enhancing team efficiency and accountability. DARE categorizes roles as: Deciders: The individuals with final decision-making authority. Advisors: Experts who provide insights to inform decisions but do not have the authority to make them. Recommenders: Team members responsible for conducting analyses and presenting options. Execution Stakeholders: Those responsible for implementing decisions and ensuring desired outcomes. In Janes case, applying the DARE model brought much-needed clarity and structure to her teams decision-making process. As the Decider, Jane retained ultimate authority, ensuring accountability for outcomes and alignment with organizational goals. Senior HR and Labor Law experts acted as Advisors, providing critical insights and guidance. Jesse stepped into the Recommender role, conducting analyses, exploring options, and presenting well-researched recommendations. Finally, the Execution Stakeholders, who were the other team members, took responsibility for implementing the decisions, asking clarifying questions, and addressing challenges to ensure success. With these clearly defined roles, managers can effectively distribute decision-making responsibilities, reduce bottlenecks, and empower their teams to operate independently and efficiently. 3. Conduct reflection check-ins and after-action reviews Structured reflection promotes continuous learning and growth. Using the ORID model, leaders engage with employees in brief but meaningful reflection sessions to analyze their actions and decisions with questions like: Objective: What facts or events were relevant to this situation? Reflective: How did this situation make you feel? Interpretive: What does this experience reveal about our processes? Decisional: What actions will you take? The After-Action Review (AAR) framework complements reflective practices by guiding teams through a structured evaluation of outcomes. Key questions such as, What was supposed to happen?, What worked well?, and What will you do differently next time? helps ensure a thorough comparison of expectations and actual results, highlighting both successes and areas for growth. These reflective practices play a crucial role in helping team members internalize lessons and apply them in future scenarios, fostering greater independence and resilience. Leaders in flat organizations need to shift from being problem-solvers to enablers of growth and autonomy. By adopting coaching techniques, clarifying roles, and embedding reflection into their teams workflow, leaders like Jane can reduce reliance on themselves while building a more confident, capable, and self-sufficient team. Over time, these strategies cultivate a culture of continuous improvement and proactive decision-making, empowering everyone to thrive.
Category:
E-Commerce
Two-thirds of people have imposter syndrome, according to a 2011 article published in the International Journal Of Behavioral Science. These are people who often feel like a fraud or believe their achievements were a fluke. Bearing those statistics in mind, theres a high likelihood that mentors suffer from this as well. How is someone who doesnt recognize the inherent value of their own achievements supposed to mentor others? Imposter syndrome amongst mentors Mentorship discussions typically focus on the mentees imposter syndrome but neglect the mentors own struggles. When someone, no matter how successful, feels like an imposter (assuming they can get over the first hurdle and agree to mentor someone) it impacts how effective they are in the relationship. They might over-prepare for mentoring sessions and hesitate to offer advice for fear of being wrong. When the mentee succeeds, it can amplify their imposter feelings. If they dont take steps to address this, it can erode the trust between themselves and the mentee. Nearly half of all Nobel Prize winners had mentors that were award-winners (or their direct professional descendants). In a small sample of 10 Nobel Prize Winners who came out of the Yellow Beret program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the Vietnam War, 100% either trained with a Nobel Laureate (or those only one degree removed). Living in that ecosystem of extreme achievement can increase the pressure to live up to expectations, and might trigger feelings of fraud and doubt. Mentors dont necessarily need to have all the answers, so they need to know where to look or who to ask. In many cases, they are in in uncharted territory, guiding mentees in fields or skills where they might be less experienced. This can breed feelings of inadequacy. If someone is already battling with imposter syndrome, guiding another person in an unfamiliar area can exacerbate that feeling. Caroline Flanagan, in her insightful work on this subject, highlights that mentors can benefit from actionable strategies to turn their insecurities into opportunities for growth. If youre a mentor suffering from imposter syndrome, you will benefit from adopting the following mindset and actions. Reframe self-doubt as growth Just because its new, doesnt mean it should cause doubt. Youre learning alongside your mentee, but your experience might lead you to connect dots your mentee doesnt have the experience of hindsight to see. Go on the journey of exploration together and share the joy of mutual discovery alongside the practical win of helping your mentee. Seek peer mentorship Mentors need mentorsno matter how experienced they are. Having someone to share experiences with can normalize self-doubt. Consider seeking a mentoring supervisor that you can share your challenges with. Having that support can go a long way. Focus on your values and share your experiences No one is an expert on everything, so focus on what you do know. Take some time to reflect on your accomplishments, no matter how big or small they are. Sharing what you have learned on your journey, whether from your successes or your mistakes, can add value and take them down a new line of innovation. Be clear about what you bring to the table, rather than just worrying about what you dont. Share your vulnerability and be okay with saying I dont know Let your mentee know that you dont have all the answersand that youre fine with that. Youre modeling that its okay to show vulnerability. Work with your mentee to find out who does have the answers, because youll likely have a stronger network than they will. Being vulnerable with yourself, and accepting your limitations, is also an important conversation for you to have. Celebrate milestones together You should celebrate every milestone on the way to success. Not every one of your mentees successes will be because of your actions, but be okay with that. Celebrate their overall progress and your role in your mentees journey. Even if you don’t have all the answers, youre shaping your mentees path to success. As a mentor, you might occasionally feel like an imposter, but your mentees dont see you in that light. They see you as a leader, guide, cheerleader, and champion.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||