This article is going to roundup some of the partnerships that have taken place in recent months between BESS technology companies other technology providers to develop data centre-tailored solutions, as well as data centre owners themselves. They are primarily centred around the US market, which is currently building more data centres than Europe.
Fluence and Siemens
Siemens is set to develop a reference architecture purpose-built for Nvidia AI data centres. This will be in collaboration with Fluence which is supplying the BESS for the AI data centres. The reference architecture will turn Nvidia’s AI factory vision into a deployable architecture for hyperscalers, co-location providers and specialised cloud infrastructure providers.
This reference design from Siemens can support a facility capacity of 136MW, which includes a 100MW IT load, and utility connections for both medium- and low-voltage distribution. The architecture has been developed to support Tier III concurrent maintainability, meaning any component can be serviced without interrupting data centre operations.
Fluence’s role in the partnership is the integration of their Smartstack BESS into the design, which will help to curb grid instability events such as voltage and frequency fluctuations, and will provide black start capability and load smoothing for AI workloads that unevenly draw power. Thermal management services will be provided by nVent, which has deployed over 2GW of global liquid-cooling capacity to date.
