I N D U S T R Y I N T E L L I G E N C E
Nirupa Chander , Senior Vice President , Secure Power & Data Centers , International Operations , Schneider Electric
budget and customer satisfaction . Managing project teams and later operational roles allowed me to gain diverse experience .
My goal was to run a profit and loss ( P & L ), so I shifted from engineering to sales and business development , acquiring a wellrounded business acumen . Over time , I took on regional responsibilities and moved into corporate roles , continuously adding tools and experience to my repertoire . There was no magic recipe , as such .
It is well known that traditional industries such as energy and data infrastructure could benefit from more gender equality . What have been some of your experiences where you have broken the mould , or successes that can inspire future generations ?
It is hard not to notice the lack of gender balance in engineering generally .
There ’ s always the excuse that not enough women engineers graduate , that there ’ s just a smaller pool . If you do the research and the analysis , the bigger problem is the leaky pipeline .
Women drop off at critical points in their career and it happens in nearly every geography in every culture . Women are dropping off at critical junctures of their career , whether it is linked decisions around family or responsibility for ageing relatives , you find that women are not sustaining their career paths .
A long-term career path requires a lot of investment of time and effort , and when you ’ ve got conflicting responsibilities it ’ s hard . I think as an industry , we need to focus more on retention of the women that we bring into the organisation rather than only focusing on the intake . That ’ s where I think Schneider Electric and its metrics are doing a great job .
We ’ ve got an ambition around our sustainability impact , which is having 50 % women in hiring , 40 % women in front line management , and 30 % women in leadership teams by 2025 . We are well on our way to meeting those targets . There is still work to do , and we need to develop more women into leadership positions . If we ’ re going to solve this issue , it is about enabling women to succeed in corporate careers .
From your time in the energy sector , what are your impressions of how the digital infrastructure industry operates in comparison ?
One phenomenon that is obvious is the power demand from accelerated computing is near exponential .
Just six years ago , AFCOM ’ s State of the Data Center Report recorded the average rack density at 6kW , this year ’ s report says it is now at 12kW , with the majority ( 55 %) of respondents stating that they expect further increases in the next 12 months . That multiplies the power increase within a single rack which , when accumulated into an overall system , grows exponentially . With AI , that density could reach 100kW , as per our new reference designs .
We need to be able to serve this power from the generation side and enable the build out of all this IT infrastructure , but we have to do it in a sustainable way . Therefore , there ’ s a critical paradigm and situation in the industry today .
I think the challenge in the industry today is that we ’ ve done fantastically well in developing these amazing chips that can do a lot of things , moving AI ever closer to general intelligence with these highcapacity chips . But at the same time , they need a lot of power . They need a lot of cooling systems , and that ’ s where I think the engineering world of data and energy are really starting to converge .
We have got to enable this growth with better efficiency .
What are your views on some of the major challenges facing the digital infrastructure industry , such as sustainability , energy efficiency , scaling up for AI demand , etc ?
Looking at all of these challenges , there isn ’ t a one company solution . It ’ s going to have to be done by partnership . We have partnerships with the likes of NVIDIA , which wasn ’ t on the radar say a decade ago . We are learning how to design the infrastructure that surrounds this new generation of application . This is new for the industry , so you have to be able to do it with partnerships , and new kinds of partnerships .
The way it has been characterised is that NVIDIA is the jet and Schneider Electric is the aircraft carrier . It ’ s a symbiotic relationship .
I mentioned already about the challenges of energy and doing things more efficiently – and doing it with as many green electrons as possible .
Another challenge is where do you build out these data centres in a way that they ’ re most efficient and ensuring that there is the transmission from the grid , and the infrastructure to support that . We ’ re seeing linked opportunities at Schneider Electric on the grid infrastructure side , because where there is a big data centre hub being created , there ’ s also a lot of energy infrastructure that needs to be created around it to support it . For example , in UAE , to support its AI strategy , its building a whole new power grid with 5,000 MW of power .
Given your unique experience of being in the energy industry for so long and now expanding your leadership into the data centre sphere , what are the topics you are passionate about or want to tackle ?
There are a lot of lessons that can be transferred from the energy side of things .
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