Notes from the bleeding edge of data and telecom

As a Global Key Account Manager at Henkel, one of the perks of the job is travel. From week to week, I get to visit various design sites and work with engineers to understand their application needs and help develop the right materials for those needs.

On these trips, what I’m consistently amazed at is how much innovation is happening right now. Whether that’s something we haven’t seen before, something that’s being done a little differently, or something that might not be needed on the production line for two years’ time, change is happening everywhere, and fast—the level of innovation required to keep pace is truly eye-opening.

So, here are a few of the most exciting things I’m seeing from the data and telecom industry.

Almost always, the first thing mechanical and thermal design engineers want to talk about is thermal management.

This, of course, is already a well-defined market, but as our customers are always trying to push the limits of what’s possible, the demands are growing. So, what can we as Henkel do? How can we improve the overall thermal management of a system?

From the cooling systems for immersion cooling down to the chip level, we have to match our customers’ ambitions with our thermal interface materials (TIM).

For example, that could mean looking at ways of improving our thin bond line materials or using different fillers to support their requirements.

Then it’s about understanding the customer’s roadmap. What’s their power consumption going to be in two, five, ten years’ time? How can we align our material developments with that roadmap? When we work in this type of open and collaborative way, it’s easier to find the right answers.

From our standpoint, though, perhaps the most important thing is reliability. As this is a performance game, our materials have to be reliable in the long run. We have to make sure each piece of hardware performs at its best with the thermal requirements needed. Any type of field failure will cause a system replacement sooner than the full lifecycle, increasing waste and costs, so our overarching objective has to be making sure that doesn’t happen.

In terms of trends, to my mind the debonding initiative in the consumer electronics industry is one with huge potential.

Debonding-on-demand adhesives allow consumers to repair components without damaging the rest of the product. For example, with the iPhone 16, consumers can easily remove and replace the battery at home from the comfort of their living room.

The main reason I see potential to transfer this type of design into data and telecom hardware is because data centers are all at different stages of their lifecycle—some are ageing, others are being built as we speak—and to accommodate this, they’re built in a modular way. It’s not a great leap to suggest that if the debonding initiative can expand to data centers, in time the module concepts could be removed instead of entirely overhauled, cutting out waste in-between.

Especially as the technology is advancing all the time, there might be potential to upgrade certain parts of the system without the full cost of an upgrade, enabling a significant advantage vis-à-vis cost of ownership.

In Uniquely Wired and other places, there’s been a lot of talk around AI and the increased power demands it’s asking of data centers.

One thing the magazine didn’t broach, as far as I can tell, is how AI can improve operations in the data center. From what I’m seeing and hearing, the clearest use case is digital twins.

This is particularly the case for contract manufacturers who assemble and build the hardware. It’s these companies who are using digital twins to model scenarios and find the best ways of improving their processes, such as improving usage rates or measuring sustainability metrics.

In this regard, the possibilities are endless. Experts have more data at their disposal than ever before, and it’s crazy to think that they’re only just beginning to get a handle on how to use these insights. The question is, how far can they take things?