Google’s leader of data center infrastructure, Tom Garvens, spoke on Sept. 23 at Data Center World Power. During a deep dive into Google’s grid-interactive data centers, he offered an important insight into how Google thinks about data center innovation and the supply chain of equipment makers and other suppliers supporting it.

“Scale is critical, and many times we're gated about what we can do by what we can get from the supply chain and our partners,” said Garvens, Google’s vice president of data center advanced technology innovation. “So, our collaborations with our supply chain partners are incredibly critical.”

The suppliers that can deliver at the global volume the data center and energy industries need, on schedule and with consistent quality, are the ones standing out in today’s fast-moving, high-pressure data center buildout environment.

“The era of manufacturing prowess is here, and you can differentiate yourself with manufacturing capacity, because it really is capacity that's needed,” he said.

Google still thrives on innovation, and Garvens noted numerous examples, including creative ways it's tackling initiatives such as energy sustainability and water efficiency.

For example, it’s partnering with Energy Dome, a long-duration energy storage company, on a system to store excess wind and solar power by compressing gaseous CO2 into a liquid underground, then using that stored power when needed to run turbines and produce electricity for the grid. Such innovations contribute to Google’s broad sustainability initiative, which includes contracting for 12 gigawatts of clean energy in 2025 alone.

Yet innovative ideas only make sense if they can be deployed across Google’s data center footprint. Solid-state transformers offer a timely example of a highly promising emerging technology, with Google encouraging industry-standard designs that would let multiple manufacturers build similar SSTs.

“The biggest thing is about when we get this to scale,” Garvens said. “It's easy to do this one off in a lab, but to do it across dozens of sites in hundreds of gigawatts takes a lot of supply chain in these SSTs.”