How emerging data tools reshape engineering decisions, responsibilities, and long-term refrigeration design.

It has been said that the hardest thing to achieve in business is behavior change. Millions of dollars are spent on advertising campaigns for all sorts of products, from perfumes to politicians, and yet humans are fickle and often will react against any messaging that is too blunt or obvious. This makes it all the more surprising that the growth of AI technology, which is driving an unprecedented growth in data center construction, has taken off so fast.

Any student in full-time education, whether that is at the high school, undergraduate or postgraduate level, is exposed to AI on a daily basis. This is not all bad news. Tutors and professors are learning to make good use of the technology to enhance their teaching, and the good students seem to be able to figure out how to use it to make them even better rather than just treating it as a techno-servant who will do their homework for them. However, the same students who use AI on a daily basis are those who express real concern for the ecological damage done by previous generations while at the same time seeming to be unaware of the environmental burden imposed by AI.

Those of us who are a bit older, whose formal education was in pre-internet days, are also meeting AI regularly. Any internet search now seems to come with an artificially generated summary of the findings, explaining what I can actually just read for myself slightly further down the screen. I recently took delivery of a new car and wanted to know how a particular function worked. I used the voice command feature and asked the car, thinking that it would just direct me to the appropriate page of the driver’s manual. I was surprised when it replied, “According to ChatGPT the function is usually accessed by….” I’m still not sure what to make of that conversation. Whether we want it or not, AI is all around us and seems to be here to stay.

You might assume that this rapid growth of computing power requirements is good news for the sector of the refrigeration and air-conditioning industry that serves the data center market, and in the short term you would be right. However, as the recent series of excellent ASHRAE Journal columns by Dustin Demetriou and David Quirk has shown, the pace of change of the technology within the servers is accelerating and many previously common technologies are already obsolete. As data centers draw more and more valuable resources, including electrical generation capacity and water, to be able to function, we will approach a point where the other uses for those resources need support. Those other uses might include activities not normally considered to be “mission critical” — a term often reserved for the data center market.

But in recent heat waves the life-preserving role of air conditioning has been very evident, and what could be more “mission critical” than food production and distribution? One of the key lessons learned during the 2020 pandemic was that the food chain, including the cold chain, needs to be considered to be critical national infrastructure.

To save ourselves there is an urgent and increasing need for computer technology to break the cycle of increasing utility requirements so that scarce resources can be allocated to other mission critical activities. If only we had a techno-servant to help us with that particular piece of homework. Oh, wait….