Schneider Electric scales its Barcelona manufacturing hub to boost its production of prefabricated data centres in Europe for AI-driven computing demands.
As demand for AI and accelerated computing continues to surge, Schneider Electric has committed to increasing its production capacity.
Taking place at its largest data centre factory in Europe, Sant Boi de Llobregat in Barcelona, the company is scaling its existing manufacturing and integration footprint from 7000 metres squared to 12,000 metres squared. This is in response to accelerated customer demand for prefabricated high-compute workload data centre solutions.
The prefabricated data centre factory is a large-scale logistics centre and is one of the primary European locations for the design, production and integration of Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Modular Data Centre Portfolio.
The company hopes to increase its end-to-end production capabilities for its portfolio, including critical components like its high-density racks, UPS, MV, LV and circuit breakers.
Driven by customer demand
Schneider Electric’s factory in Barcelona is one of the largest dedicated manufacturing centres for Schneider Electric’s prefabricated modular data centre solutions in Europe.
It supports customer growth across the regions’ primary and secondary markets and now provides an additional 5000 metres squared of dedicated production space – meeting accelerated customer requirements for speed to market, predictability and resilient data centre solutions.
A prefabricated modular data centre refers to a data centre built from pre-engineered and factory-combined units. As a portable method of deploying data centre capacity, a modular data centre can be placed anywhere data capacity is required.
The expansion of this factory is largely driven by demands for high-compute workloads and AI, which is advancing at a very rapid pace. Across Europe alone, demand for these technologies could cause demand to more than triple by 2030, reaching 35 gigawatts (GW).
Alongside this, according to Omdia, global sales of prefabricated modular data centre systems to generate US$8.6bn in 2027.
Schneider Electric’s investment has enabled the company to double its end-to-end production, integration, testing and output capabilities for both its all-in-one modular data centres and prefabricated power modules.
This includes key powertrain components such as three-phase uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), low (LV) and medium-voltage (MV) equipment, circuit breakers and switchgear.
“Prefabricated modular data centres are one of the most efficient and sustainable ways to design and deploy high performance data centre capacity at speed and scale, while ensuring less wastage, optimised production and a reduction in the embedded carbon within the space,” says Marc Garner, SVP, Secure Power & Data Centre Business at Schneider Electric, Europe.
Building resilient global supply chains for AI
Global supply chains are being made more resilient when built with AI and accelerated computing in mind, according to Schneider Electric.
Recently, the organisation announced a US$3bn multi-year agreement with Compass Datacenters, one of the fastest-growing data centre companies. The partnership is designed to integrate both organisations’ respective supply chains, in addition to manufacturing prefabricated modular data centre solutions quickly and cost-effectively at-scale.
The agreement has been arranged for five years and is a direct response to AI demands. Both companies are eager to deliver highly scalable modular data centres that are simple in design and can offer streamlined manufacturing solutions, whilst offering the ability to be deployed easily across a range of remote environments.
Schneider Electric’s investment in its Sant Boi factory mirrors this strategy entirely and will provide European customers with the ability to scale-up their data centre operations in Tier 1 and Tier 2 data centre markets, and accelerate deployment times by utilising best-in-class manufacturing and testing capabilities.
When it comes to the Sant Boi factory, Schneider Electric is offering a highly optimised production environment that enables businesses to build-out standardised or customisable high-compute workload data centre clusters.
Here, solutions can be prefabricated power modules, or they can combine power, cooling and IT infrastructure into one advanced and ready-to-ship solution.
Marc Garner adds: “By scaling up our end-to-end production capacity in Barcelona, we’re reinforcing our supply chain capabilities at a time of unprecedented growth and ensuring customers in Europe have access to fast, predictable and high-quality data centre solutions, which can be designed and operational in as little as 24-weeks.”
