The Gulf and the UAE in particular already have operational colocation capacity, with many more announced meaning the country’s data centre electricity demand should double from 3 TWh in 2025 to more than 6 TWh by 2030. Behind every one of those announcements sits an engineering problem that rarely makes the headlines: how to keep a building that never sleeps within a few degrees of its design point, in a climate that gives it no help, without a single unplanned second of downtime.
A hotel, an office tower or a residential block tolerates slack. Occupancy varies, loads fall away at night and in winter, and a chiller taken offline for maintenance is an inconvenience rather than an incident. Mission critical systems, such as those used for data centres, tolerate none of this. Every watt delivered to the IT load is converted into heat that must be removed continuously, at the same rate, every hour of the year. There is no seasonal dip and no off-peak.
