For the second installment of our Executive Roundtable for the Fourth Quarter of 2025, we turn to a question reshaping every AI-era build: the economics of acceleration.
Hyperscale timelines that once stretched years now compress into quarters, forcing owners and operators to make high-consequence tradeoffs between getting capacity online fast and optimizing the long-term cost of ownership. The tension is sharpest where the industry’s clocks are misaligned: AI demand is surging now, while power-delivery schedules, regulatory approvals, and sustainability mandates often move on decade cycles.
As speed-to-market becomes both a competitive catalyst and a financial risk, our panel explores how leading developers are navigating this gap: which decisions they’re front-loading, which costs they’re willing to carry forward, and how they’re redefining economic discipline in an infrastructure landscape where acceleration is no longer optional.
Our distinguished slate of panelists for Q4 includes:
- Rob Lowe, Director RD&E – Global High Tech, Ecolab
- Phillip Marangella, Chief Marketing and Product Officer, EdgeConneX
- Ben Rapp, Manager, Strategic Project Development, Rehlko
- Joe Reele, Vice President, Datacenter Solution Architects, Schneider Electric
And now onto our second Executive Roundtable question for Q4 of 2025.
Data Center Frontier: With hyperscale timelines collapsing and AI demand surging, how are owners and operators balancing speed-to-market with long-term cost of ownership, especially when power infrastructure and sustainability mandates move at different speeds?
Rob Lowe, Ecolab: With AI demand surging and hyperscale timelines collapsing, operators must balance speed-to-market with long-term efficiency and sustainability.
Power availability often lags construction schedules, forcing data centers to maximize compute per watt and adopt cooling systems that reduce energy intensity.
Cooling-as-a-Service helps bridge the gap by shifting commissioning risk, improving reliability during fast builds, and enabling long-term cost predictability.
At the same time, operators must design with future regulations in mind, making efficiency, digital monitoring, and lifecycle asset health as important as upfront delivery speed.
Phillip Marangella, EdgeConneX: Speed of delivery and scale of capacity are the two key gating factors as we enter the Gigawatt-era in support of AI factories.
With the global data center market forecast to grow 6X and reach an annual take-up rate of 30GW, data center operators must develop new ways to deliver large volumes of capacity in much shorter timeframes.
That requires:
- New designs that optimize speed by using repeatable, standardized architectures across multiple sites;
- Foregoing traditional permanent structures, leveraging precast, prefabricated, and modular technologies;
- Making a significant up-front investment in critical supply chain equipment for power and data center infrastructure.
Ben Rapp, Rehlko: The pace of AI deployment is outpacing grid capacity in many regions, which means power strategy is now directly tied to deployment timelines.
To move fast without sacrificing lifecycle cost or reliability, operators are adopting modular power systems that can be installed and commissioned quickly, then expanded or adapted as loads grow.
From an energy perspective, this requires architectures that support multiple pathways: traditional generation, cleaner fuels like HVO, battery energy storage, and eventually hydrogen or renewable integrations where feasible.
Backup power is no longer a static insurance policy, it’s a dynamic part of the operating model, supporting uptime, compliance, and long-term cost management.
Rehlko’s global footprint and broad energy portfolio enable us to support operators through these transitions with scalable solutions that meet existing technical needs while providing a roadmap for future adaptation.
Joe Reele, Schneider Electric: There are several approaches to balancing speed-to-market with long-term cost of ownership as hyperscale timelines compress and AI demand surges, especially when power infrastructure and sustainability mandates move at different speeds.
One effective strategy is adopting a standardized, modular approach to infrastructure that is closely coupled with IT needs.
Importantly, standardized and modular does not mean inflexible; these designs can still adapt to evolving requirements.
About the Author
Matt Vincent
A B2B technology journalist and editor with more than two decades of experience, Matt Vincent is Editor in Chief of Data Center Frontier.
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