DATA CENTRES
Engineering for speed without compromising quality
By Gary McGillan, Engineering Director, TES Power T
here has been a great deal of discussion concerning the sheer scale of demand being driven by the AI boom, not to
mention the ever expanding global appetite for cloud and other digital infrastructure applications In Europe alone, data centre electricity consumption is expected to grow by more than 45 TWh, or around 70 per cent, between 2024 and 2030, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), with AI accelerating the deployment of increasingly power-dense infrastructure.
For Ireland-based TES Power, this rapid
growth is creating signifi cant opportunities, but also intensifying the pressure on data centre developers and their supply chains to deliver critical power infrastructure at greater speed, without compromising quality, reliability or resilience. However, the AI boom doesn’t just mean
building bigger. Increasingly, equipment manufacturers and data centre builders also face pressure to deliver these bigger projects on signifi cantly shorter timelines. In the UK, Ireland and the Nordics, new research from data centre infrastructure fi rm Onnec found that operators are being pushed to shorten build programmes as AI demand accelerates. More than nine-in-ten builders have said they are being “forced to compress build timelines” to keep pace with AI demand. With the added pressure of speed, the risks of quality issues and project disruptions only get bigger, as shrinking timelines mean less time for iteration and bespoke designs, not to mention supply chain delays. Meeting the engineering and supply chain challenges posed by the increasing pace of the AI boom is driving an industry-wide industrialisation of the build process to deliver the kind of speed and scale AI projects demand without sacrifi cing quality. At TES Power, increasing the speed of delivery without compromising on the quality of the fi nished product is leading to a combination of connected digital processes, standardised modular design, and rapid prototyping.
A DIGITAL THREAD FROM DESIGN TO MANUFACTURE
On the mechanical design side, designs are created in Autodesk Inventor and managed through the Vault, which controls the associated documents and revisions. The digital information then fl ows directly through to manufacturing.
www.irish-manufacturing.com
Shop-fl oor teams can access the complete 3D mechanical model of a build rather than relying solely on traditional 2D drawings, shortening the feedback loop between engineering and manufacturing. If they identify an issue, they can mark up the model and add comments, with that feedback shared directly with the engineering team, all contained within a single persistent, holistic platform. The obvious result is faster access to and exchange of information. But the process also creates a more collaborative manufacturing environment in which production personnel are able to contribute to the design process. By putting the same information in the hands of mechanical engineers and shop-fl oor teams, problems can be identifi ed earlier and resolved faster.
STANDARDISATION WITHOUT SACRIFICING FLEXIBILITY
Standardisation is another enabler of manufacturing speed. At TES, rather than engineering switchboards, modular pods, or skids from scratch, products are designed as collections of standardised, confi gurable modules. The goal is to standardise as much as 95 per cent of the mechanical design, allowing engineers to select proven confi gurations of components and assemblies from a design library rather than repeatedly reinventing them. The high degree of modularity in TES’ designs
allows for this level of standardisation to actually increase the fl exibility of design teams. Standardisation doesn’t mean producing identical
or infl exible designs. It means using a controlled set of proven building blocks from which highly confi gurable products can be assembled.
3D PRINTING ACCELERATES ITERATION
Rapid prototyping provides another opportunity to compress manufacturing lead times, 3D printing, means components can be produced in plastic in a matter of hours, letting designers and engineers test an idea, make improvements and manufacture an updated version almost immediately. It’s possible to put a new component through half a dozen design iterations in a single day rather than constantly sending new components out to a third party over the course of weeks or months.
By resolving design issues while they are still inexpensive and easy to change, manufacturers can enter the fi nal production process with greater confi dence and dramatically reduce the likelihood of costly changes down the road. Keeping pace with the speed of the AI boom is a complex challenge with multi-faceted solutions. By combining connected digital design, modularised standardisation, and rapid prototyping (among other techniques), TES has developed a manufacturing process in which speed comes from removing avoidable work rather than cutting corners, resulting in a more responsive production process build for both speed and high, replicable standards in terms of output quality.
www.tesgroup.com September/October 2026 Irish Manufacturing 43
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