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CH Caspar Herzberg On The Energy Gang

“AI factories, these large data centers, you have to treat them like factories. They're not data centers, like some little thing that in the past a startup used to build. These are massive installations, and we should treat them as true industrial sites. … The way data centers are designed and built today is more on a one-off basis still. The more you standardize that, and the more you're able to do process simulation within these large AI factories, that saves you energy, that allows you to sell that energy back to the community.”

The Energy Gang · Climate & Energy · November 2026

“AI factories, these large data centers, you have to treat them like factories. They're not data centers, like some little thing that in the past a startup used to build. These are massive installations, and we should treat them as true industrial sites. … The way data centers are designed and built today is more on a one-off basis still. The more you standardize that, and the more you're able to do process simulation within these large AI factories, that saves you energy, that allows you to sell that energy back to the community.” — Caspar Herzberg, The Energy Gang

Context

Asked about rising electricity demand from data centers and the worry about ratepayer costs, the industrial-software CEO argues for planning data centers as industrial sites, with optimized cooling and flexible demand, so they can help the grid rather than strain it.

Transcript

The Energy Gang Around 26:20 into the episode
Caspar Herzberg

…of people behind that with that simple message that is maybe less focused on just sustainability or just the ease of oil and gas as a generation provider, but more that if you have more options, you're better off in a world where you don't know what's going to come next. That's what I would say.

Ed Crooks

…Many countries around the world are very much exacerbated by the consequences of the conflict in many places. So what can be done about that, do you think? I mean, do you have solutions or ideas on addressing this kind of issue of rising demand and affordability and how they can be reconciled?

Caspar Herzberg

You're absolutely right. I mean, maybe the first thing to do is that AI factories, these large data centers, you have to treat them like factories. They're not data centers, like some little thing that in the past a startup used to build, right? These are massive installations, and we should treat them as industrial sites, as true industrial sites, right? And that means that they have to be planned properly. That means that you have to invest into the optimization of both the cooling and the energy consumption. And realize that there's going to be flexibility in their energy consumption and bring that together in a design, build, operate software management cycle, right? That's not the case today. So the way data centers are designed and built today is more on a one-time, you know, on a one-off basis still, right? Because it's so new. So it's still done one way here, a different way here. The more you standardize that, and the more you are able in the future to do a lot of planning, to do a lot of process simulation within the data center in these large AI factories, that then saves you energy, that then allows you to sell that energy back to the community, then I think you're going to be solving some of these issues you've just mentioned.

Ed Crooks

Yeah, I think that's very interesting. And I think that makes a lot of sense. And certainly, as you say, there's an enormous amount of interest in this idea that data centers can be an asset to the grid, not just a liability. I do think, though, a lot of that depends on a word you just used, which…

Caspar Herzberg

So I think the answer is emerging. And I think the answer is you can have the five nines, right? But you can still get visibility into the data center's operations itself. So in other words, what are the computing workloads? When do they happen? How is that linked to the cooling systems? How is…

Ed Crooks

I was about to ask that. So do you think it's the case then that for practical purposes, all large data centers are going to have to be flexible in the future?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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