Data centers continue to drive growth for architects

In 2022, Chheng Lim of Chicago-based Sheehan Nagle Hartray Architects gave a presentation at that year’s AIA Conference on Architecture on her area of design expertise, which had never been discussed at the meeting before: data centers.  

In the time since, with the explosion of AI, demand for design and construction services for data centers—which make almost everything we do on the internet possible—has only continued to rise. One estimate from consulting firm McKinsey & Company sees global demand for data center capacity tripling by 2030. 

Sheehan Nagle Hartray Architects are global data center experts, with current projects underway across North and South America, Europe, and Asia. We followed up with Lim and colleague Neil Sheehan on how their firm has adapted to rapid growth and continued to iterate their design processes. While AI is certainly driving conversation, it may not necessarily be driving all of the demand in this sector, Lim says: “The demand for cloud computing is still there and growing dramatically—AI is just adding another level to it.”  

Here are a few more key takeaways: 

No slowdown in sight

The demands placed on data infrastructure by remote work are literally reshaping the United States. 

“As everyone went to remote work and people started moving to smaller cities or rural areas, there needed to be a different infrastructure to support that distributed population, which is why we’re seeing data centers, in the past couple of years, increasingly going to secondary or tertiary markets to serve that distributed population need,” Lim says. 

In her 2022 presentation, Lim emphasized the disparity in the United States, and the world, between those who have internet access and those who don’t (and are subsequently shut out of information and opportunity). At the time, 40% of the world population was not online. In 2025, that percentage has decreased to 33%. In the U.S., according to the most recent numbers from the Pew Research Institute, 91% of the U.S. population is currently online. “What we’re trying to plan for is for 100% of the world population to go online,” she says—and data centers will make it possible. 

Data center architects are continuing to “design a design process” 

“In 2022, we were still trying to figure out the inputs, or the criteria, for design,” Lim says. “I think there’s a greater clarity and definition to that [now]."

Lim, Sheehan and their colleagues are able to design prototypes that their clients can then deploy across a number of different sites—allowing the process from design to construction to take as little as 14 months. 

“We know that the drivers are electrical configurations, mechanical configurations, and the relationship of these components,” Sheehan says. “I think the architecture community that design data centers are becoming savvier in those languages.” 

A still-formidable challenge, however, is the problem of scale. “We’re really beginning to push the threshold of BIM,” she says. “Our models are very intense. They have a lot of infrastructure. There’s a lot of geometry, a lot of data. It has really stretched the limit of what Revit typically does. What that has necessitated is that we’ve had to develop workflows to deal with these very large models.” 

She continues, “Our clients are building what they call 10X now—ten times bigger projects—but the schedule remains the same.” 

In addition to the complexities of design, on a more practical level, there simply needs to be enough space on a site to house thousands of workers and, since many data centers aren’t close to other development, their cars.

 “Three thousand people arrive for work every day, for example—just something as simple as that has to be managed,” Sheehan says. Adding to the levels of complexity are the power distribution and fiber or networking distribution across the site. In some cases, the firm has designed an additional utility substation on a 10-acre plot to provide power.

One way in which the firm has iterated on the data center design process is by looking beyond the data centers themselves.

“It used to be that an architect would primarily be focused on everything within the building enclosure,” Lim says. “But at the scale in which we’re building currently, it’s required us to become savvy and knowledgeable about these broader site components and utility infrastructures. We’re really designing almost a mini city by this point.” 

Addressing energy usage concerns

The amount of energy that data centers require is another formidable design challenge, and a topic that’s garnered increasing scrutiny over the last several years. A Department of Energy report from December 2024 estimates that data center load growth has tripled over the past decade. Data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023. 

Data centers growing bigger means that their mechanical requirements are changing as well. The air-cooling systems that were once the norm are no longer sufficient to cool down the server equipment, and newer data centers are employing liquid cooling. “There’s a lot more coordination that’s required of us internal to the building,” Sheehan says.

Lim and Sheehan say that there are a wider set of policy conversations that need to be discussed to address the issue going forward, but that their clients have very early discussions with power companies to be transparent about their needs, and that several have even paid to expand the system infrastructure. “They’re enhancing the whole system in order to provide for their load, and then those enhancements feed other needs within the community, too,” Sheehan says.  

Katherine Flynn is Director, Digital Content at AIA.