Vertiv Week 2026<\/a> was structured in three distinct acts. Day one belonged to European data center association groups. Day two opened up to press. Day three handed the floor to engineers and consultants.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBut the event wasn’t confined to conference rooms. Attendees also walked the floor of a nearby manufacturing facility, watching platforms like One Core and SmartRun move from production line to shipment, bound for customers across the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Petik oversees one of five business units at Vertiv. His group, Infrastructure Solutions, designs and delivers complete data center solutions end to end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Middle East Is Warming Up, Not Peaking Yet<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nRight now, the loudest demand signals for factory built infrastructure come from the Nordics, with Western Europe close behind. The Middle East, by contrast, is still gathering steam. Petik expects that to change soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Vertiv isn’t waiting to find out. Two factories already operate in Ras Al Khaimah, feeding customers across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Power modules are built locally there, while the heavier design work happens in centralized hubs before being localized close to the customer at the point of delivery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why Engineers Can No Longer Work in Silos<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nHere’s the shift Petik kept coming back to: disciplines that once operated independently now have to move in lockstep. Chip makers, infrastructure providers, and data center operators are being pulled into the same room, often from day one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s because the industry has started treating the data center as a single product, not a stack of separate systems. Power, thermal, controls, and networking teams now need to co-design rather than hand off work in sequence. The payoff isn’t just technical performance. It’s better techconomics across the whole build.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is arguably the biggest change reshaping data center design today, and it’s happening whether or not a given region is ready for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One Global Playbook, With Local Accents<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nDoes the Middle East need its own design philosophy? Petik doesn’t think so. In his view, the fundamentals of data center design shouldn’t diverge much by geography, even if local specifics still apply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pattern, as he describes it, usually starts in North America. From there, proven practices migrate outward, eventually reaching India and the Middle East as regional teams adopt what’s already working elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prefab Is the New Default<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nSpeed is forcing another change: prefabrication. Rather than building components from scratch on site, the industry is standardizing building blocks before they ever reach a customer’s location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That standardization pays off twice. It makes forecasting more accurate, and it makes outcomes more repeatable from one factory to the next. Fewer surprises, faster timelines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Testing Factories Before They Exist<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nPerhaps the most forward looking piece of Vertiv’s strategy is virtual. Through model based system engineering, teams can now build, stress test, and validate an entire AI factory inside a virtual environment, long before ground is broken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That means design flaws surface on a screen, not on a job site. It’s a quieter shift than prefabrication, but it may end up mattering just as much for reducing risk and uncertainty in large scale builds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What This Means Going Forward<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nPut it all together, and a clear picture emerges. Data center design is converging into a single global approach, one built on cross-discipline collaboration, prefabrication, and virtual validation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regional differences will always exist. But the underlying playbook, as Petik describes it, is becoming borderless. Whether a project sits in the Nordics, North America, or the Middle East, the same principles of data center design are increasingly setting the pace for how AI factories get built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Data center design is no longer a matter of one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":107566,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9625],"tags":[7151],"contributor":[9732],"class_list":["post-107563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview-of-the-week","tag-vertiv","contributor-news-desk"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Viktor-Petik.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Lubna","author_link":"https:\/\/techxmedia.com\/en\/author\/lubna\/"},"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t