How Can Data Center Expansion Coexist With Carbon Reduction? Carrier's Gierges: Build Modular Systems Like Lego From the Design Stage

Special Topic: 2026 Sustainable Global Leaders Conference & the Second Green Industry and Sustainable Consumption Expo. The 2026 Sustainable Global Leaders Conference was held in Shanghai from October 20 to 22.

In a themed dialogue titled "Smart Manufacturing and Green Manufacturing: Reshaping the Future of the Industrial Ecosystem," Michael L. Gierges, President of Carrier Climate Solutions for Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, shared his views on the energy consumption challenges brought by data center expansion and end-to-end lifecycle design.

Gierges said data center builders currently face multiple challenges: first, energy challenges; second, the challenge of the speed of installed capacity expansion; and third, the challenge of lifecycle energy efficiency management.

The most critical challenge lies in the extremely rapid iteration of chips. "It changes every 18 to 24 months. The data centers we build today may not necessarily be suitable for the chips 18 to 24 months from now." Therefore, he believes the most crucial thing is to create an end-to-end system at the very beginning of design, building a flexible modular system to support large-scale accelerated expansion.

"I especially like to use Lego as an example," Gierges said. "We need to adopt a Lego-brick way of thinking when designing the ecosystem, ensuring that the entire ecosystem is modular."

He said this requires taking into account energy-consuming links such as the data center cooling system, CPU, liquid cooling system and liquid cooling distribution system, with the goal of achieving a 15% reduction in energy consumption right from the design stage.

Gierges pointed out that the lifecycle and service life of a data center is about 15 years, and China is one of the countries with the largest data center scale. By 2030, total data center capacity may double.

While expanding capacity, ensuring that energy consumption is responsible and sustainable requires making sure that every module and every "Lego piece" in the data center can be updated.

He introduced that Carrier cooperates with companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft and AMD to set full-lifecycle end-to-end expectations and conduct simulations at the very beginning of customer design, ensuring the flexibility needed for future expansion while achieving energy consumption targets.

"Only in this way can we minimize material use and reduce carbon emissions as much as possible over a lifecycle of more than 20 years."