Schneider Electric sees no slowdown in its datacenter business, but says operators must be more open with communities about the power, water, and land their projects will consume.
As a supplier of electrical infrastructure, cooling, and power distribution equipment, Schneider has a direct view of operators' spending plans – and a commercial interest in continued construction.
Steven Carlini, vice president of innovation and datacenter, said Schneider's pipeline showed no slowdown. "And Schneider has a lot of agreements, supply chain agreements with the larger datacenter operators."
Reports earlier this year suggested only half the capacity planned for 2026 is actually under construction in the US, and land being cleared for new bit barn projects has plateaued.
Carlini nevertheless said US companies were building as fast as they could, contrasting that with planning bureaucracy and other obstacles in Europe.
"But the one thing that I think is going to be the biggest change is the level of transparency from the operators when they're trying to secure permits and when they're requesting power," Carlini said.
"The way the model traditionally worked in the US is the operators would negotiate with the local jurisdictions that were responsible for issuing the permits, and there would be non-disclosures involved, almost universally. So the residents where these datacenters were going to be built had no visibility into these projects until construction started."
Opposition to datacenter construction has grown in the US. Campaign groups called for a moratorium on new facilities late last year, and New York state imposed a halt this summer.
The sheer scale of the new builds has also alarmed many folk, with Meta's Hyperion facility, for example, planned to reach 5 GW of power capacity and cover an area equal to a significant chunk of Manhattan.
A recent survey by think tank Pew Research Center found that Americans are increasingly wary of datacenters, with more than half saying they are bad for the environment, bad for household energy bills, and consume water resources for cooling.
In response, companies building and operating compute sheds need to be more upfront about what effect their plans will have on the local area, Carlini said.
"They're going to have to disclose where the power is going to come from, how they're going to get the power, their water usage, their carbon emissions, the efficiency of the datacenter, where it is going to be located physically, the noise levels of the facility, the water sources, which is a big one, and how much water they're going to use is another big one that operators have traditionally not been very forthright in publishing."
In Virginia – the world's "datacenter capital" – an ex-water sustainability program manager at AWS is taking his former employer to court over claims it published false and misleading statements about water use in the state.
Carlini expects permitting requirements to force greater disclosure, followed by reporting obligations once facilities are operating.
"And then they're going to have to report it as part of regulations during operations as well, so it's not going to be a case of here's our prediction, and then you get the permit and you never have to report again," he said.
Datacenter owners and operators must win hearts and minds as well, Carlini added, a point already recognized by some in the industry at an event last year.
"From a public relations perspective, that's another area where the operators really need to focus, because in many cases they've taken the position that they're benefiting the community," he said. "Those days are gone, so the operators are going to have to, from a PR perspective, engage with the local residents more amicably."
People using Facebook or Gmail doesn't mean they'll welcome a datacenter next door, Carlini told us.
"So it's going to have to be more like 'Here's how we're going to help,'" he said. Operators would need to acknowledge residents' concerns and explain any benefits, such as tax breaks or lower costs.
For AI facilities, Carlini expects more attention to token-processing performance and efficiency, rather than power capacity alone.
"I think we're going to start to see more and more focus on tokens per watt, tokens per dollar, and even datacenters could be sized in tokens as a performance metric for the IT rather than just the power metric," he told us.
"I think the industry has suffered in the past because datacenters have always just been sized in power consumption, and that gave little idea what it was producing and what value [it] was adding."
For more on the economics of tokens in AI processing, readers can refer to our article on this topic from earlier this year. ®