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An expert Building Services Design Engineer, Adam Szczecinski brings deep experience in delivering highly technical infrastructure for complex environments. His background spans sectors such as high-end research laboratories, hospitals and energy-intensive industrial settings – each requiring stringent performance, resilience, and compliance standards.
In this blog, he shares his expertise on the challenge of compressed delivery timelines and how earlier, evidence-based performance assessments are vital for any data centre project. These insights are also featured in the IES whitepaper De-risking High-Performance Data Centres with Dynamic Simulation: How Advanced Whole-Facility Modelling Empowers High-Density Facilities to Meet Tomorrow's AI & GPU Challenges. As AI continues to reshape the data centre landscape his perspective provides valuable insight into the rapidly evolving infrastructure demands facing the industry today.
The Landscape Has Changed Dramatically
Working across a wide range of projects, I head up Building Services UK for PM Group – an international company renowned for the design, construction and commissioning of high-tech facilities across data centres, life sciences and food sectors. With over 20 years’ experience of delivering data centres at scale, we bring deep expertise across diverse locations, sizes and operating models. In today’s AI-driven market, we are helping clients to navigate increasing demands on capacity, performance and speed. This is especially important at the critical early design stage where long-term outcomes are defined.
Higher Stakes Mean Greater Expectations
It’s this recent experience that’s shown me there’s been a significant shift in what clients expect from design teams. Compressed delivery timelines mean data informed performance assessment is required during the very early stages of a project.
The idea that ‘clients need answers yesterday,’ holds true as they make significant commercial decisions on investment in a limited timeframe.
From my perspective, there’s also been a shift in cooling strategy as all of my clients have a progressive sustainability policy they are implementing on their projects. Many of our clients are fully aware that water scarcity is of growing concern, and these concerns now align with multiple new legislative country and regional directives.
A New World of Cooling Strategies
For PM Group, this has signalled a shift in cooling strategy, for example moving away from adiabatic and evaporative cooling options in some climate zones, and utilising air-cooled chillers at higher water temperatures to increase efficiency. Regulatory requirements have also become more prescriptive in many EU countries. For example, Germany is leading the way in driving the PuE down and demanding future proofing to build data centres ready for heat export.
There are some provinces in the Netherlands that are even targeting maximum PuE of 1.16, a constraint that affects everything from electrical equipment through chiller selection to rack inlet conditions. This means it’s even more urgent to ensure I carry out early-stage modelling to provide vital information on technical performance of these systems. In this way, I can help my clients to understand the implications of these regulations on the systems configuration and future performance of their facilities.
Accurately Forecasting Future Strategy
Obviously, the biggest change in the industry is AI. High-density workloads are significantly increasing thermal and electrical loads, requiring more robust cooling and power strategies. These elevated demands increase the likelihood of hotspots, operational vulnerabilities, capital investment risk and supply constraints if potential issues are not identified and accounted for early in the design process.
Our design teams conduct robust analyses to determine the most appropriate HVAC solution based on a data centre’s particular site and climate. For example, would a hybrid solution perform better in one location than another? And how do different cooling strategies compare when evaluated against real weather patterns and operational profiles? All while ensuring the design comfortably meets key temperature and humidity design conditions. Identifying climate-appropriate cooling strategies early in the design process enables us to make informed decisions that balance performance, efficiency, and capital investment.
Learn more about PM Group.
Get Even More Insight
Adam’s expertise is just part of a comprehensive analysis of how advanced modelling approaches are enabling data centre operators to build facilities that are more resilient, efficient, and prepared for the demands of AI infrastructure.
To learn more about dynamic simulation and how it addresses the key challenges facing modern data centres, download the full IES whitepaper: De-risking High-Performance Data Centres with Dynamic Simulation.
Visit our website to discover how whole-facility modelling is transforming data centre planning, design, retrofit, and operation in an era of AI-driven infrastructure demands.
