With the Middle East investing heavily in AI, digital infrastructure and data centre capacity, how is this reshaping energy planning for developers, consultants and infrastructure stakeholders across the region?
Across the Gulf, the first question a data centre developer asks is no longer where the land is, but where the power is. Energy availability has become a development decision, not a utility connection arranged at the end of construction. The IEA’s October 2026 report, Powering Artificial Intelligence, projects that electricity consumption from data centres will double over the next five years, and notes that a data centre can be built faster than the grid upgrades needed to serve it. For developers here, that means confirming firm power and connection timelines before committing to a site, then phasing capacity in line with realistic demand. At Schneider Electric, our Sharjah manufacturing facility produces AI-ready prefabricated modular data centres, so scalable infrastructure is built close to the customers who need it. Ahead of ADIPEC 2026, my message is simple: digital ambition and energy planning must advance together, because speed to market now depends on speed to reliable power.
As data centres become more power-intensive, what design and engineering considerations should consultants and project developers prioritise to balance energy availability, cooling requirements, operational resilience and sustainability from the earliest stages of a project?
In our climate, power and cooling cannot be designed separately. Cooling is often the largest electrical load after the servers themselves, so the two need to be engineered together, around the workload the facility will actually host rather than a generic assumption per square meter. Uptime Institute’s 2026 outage analysis found that 57% of respondents said their most recent major outage cost more than US$100,000, so redundancy must stay maintainable as the facility grows. Water matters as much as energy here: the IEA’s latest report finds that around a third of AI data centre capacity worldwide sits in areas of high water stress, and that cooling choices trade water against electricity. At PureDC’s 45 MW hyperscale campus on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, Schneider Electric delivered the complete power and cooling infrastructure, including the full cooling train, with a closed-loop system that improves water use efficiency and a power usage effectiveness of 1.38. The campus opened on schedule because sustainability and resilience were decided at design stage, not negotiated after the equipment arrived.
How can Schneider Electric support developers, engineering consultants and contractors in designing data centre infrastructure that can scale with AI demand while meeting the region’s growing expectations around energy efficiency and sustainability?
The developers I meet across the Gulf are not short of ambition. What they need is a way to grow without oversizing everything on day one. The IEA reported that global data centre electricity demand grew by 17% in 2025, which shows how quickly requirements move, but it does not mean every facility should be built for its final phase at the start. We help project teams set a shared roadmap for IT load and supporting infrastructure, with clear expansion triggers and performance criteria for each phase. Ankabut, the UAE’s national research and education network, is a good example. It needed uninterrupted connectivity for academic institutions across the country, with the goal of linking more than 90% of them within five years. Schneider Electric delivered a Tier III data centre together with a disaster recovery and storage centre that now run at 99.99% uptime, achieved without increasing capital expenditure and while reducing energy use. That is what responsible scaling looks like: capacity that arrives when it is needed, and efficiency that is built in rather than added later.
As the Middle East accelerates urban development and major infrastructure projects, how can digitalisation and intelligent energy management help utilities and building owners improve grid integration, energy efficiency and long-term operational performance?
A building in Dubai or Doha should be able to help the grid, not only draw from it. The IEA’s October 2026 report describes how data centres and other large loads are starting to move from passive consumers to active contributors to grid flexibility and stability, and it finds that flexible grid connections could unlock 750 to 900 GW of hosting capacity globally. The same logic applies to our buildings. Digitalisation lets owners see when and where energy is used, then coordinate flexible demand with on-site generation and storage where regulations allow, while utilities gain the network visibility they need for planning. In Qatar, our collaboration with Msheireb Properties focuses on smart-city solutions for energy management, predictive maintenance and data-driven decisions in Msheireb Downtown Doha. The opportunity for the Gulf is to connect building-level intelligence with grid-level decisions, so the whole system performs better for the people who depend on it.
Given the region’s extreme temperatures, growing electricity demand and increasingly complex infrastructure networks, how should resilience be incorporated into the planning and design of buildings, utilities and critical infrastructure projects?
Resilience in the Gulf starts with a simple question: what must keep running at 50 degrees in August, and how quickly must everything else recover? The IEA’s October 2026 report notes that over half of global data centre capacity is chronically exposed to drought or heat stress, and that clustering facilities in the same location can amplify the impact of a single extreme event. For us, heat and peak demand arrive together, so equipment that performs differently in extreme temperatures needs to be tested for exactly that, alongside the external dependencies a facility relies on. Recovery arrangements should be rehearsed, not assumed from redundancy alone. At Skyports Infrastructure’s VDX vertiport in Dubai, Schneider Electric delivered connected electrical and building systems, power-quality monitoring and Galaxy UPS protection for critical systems, so a new kind of transport infrastructure can operate reliably in our conditions. The lesson for Gulf infrastructure is to combine robust physical design with the visibility and control needed to respond the moment conditions change.
How can real-time monitoring, AI-driven analytics and predictive maintenance help consultants, asset owners and facility managers improve the performance of building systems and infrastructure throughout their operational lifecycle?
Every facility team I meet has more data than time, so the real value of monitoring is the maintenance decision it changes. With buildings accounting for around 30% of global energy demand, according to the IEA’s Energy Efficiency 2025 report, small operational faults deserve attention before they become persistent waste. Real-time data reveals abnormal consumption; analytics prioritise the likely causes so teams can act and then verify the result. At Nestlé’s Al Maha factory in Dubai South, Schneider Electric deployed power monitoring and AI-powered Asset Advisor services to support proactive electrical maintenance and energy management, which means the team addresses what matters before it fails rather than reacting afterwards. For building owners across the Gulf, the same discipline applies: connect alerts to accountable workflows, and track whether each intervention improves asset condition and performance over time.
As construction projects across the Middle East become increasingly digitalised, how can consultants and contractors better integrate building management systems, operational technology and energy infrastructure to deliver smarter, more connected assets?
The smartest buildings I have walked through are not the ones with the most dashboards; they are the ones where systems actually talk to each other. Integration needs to be procured as an outcome, not left as a gap between equipment packages. The IEA’s October 2026 report makes the same point for data centres: flexibility and grid stability both rely on one shared architecture of telemetry and real-time control, and the principle holds for any connected asset. Consultants should define a common asset-data structure and require open interfaces, with cybersecurity responsibilities agreed before tender. Contractors should then demonstrate end-to-end operating scenarios during commissioning. In the UAE, our digital-twin proof of concept with Emirates Health Services and Microsoft combined a replica patient room with a Unified Operations Centre designed to provide integrated operational insights. That supports a more useful definition of a smart asset: systems that can exchange information and coordinate actions, rather than simply appear on the same dashboard.
What practical steps should developers, consultants and project owners take at the design and specification stages to ensure new buildings and infrastructure projects are equipped to accommodate future energy demand, electrification and AI-driven applications?
Specify the options you will need, rather than paying for spare capacity you may never use. The IEA’s October 2026 report finds at least 180 GW of data centre projects waiting in grid connection queues worldwide, alongside more than 2,300 GW of renewable and storage projects, so engage the utility early. Project owners should model plausible electrification scenarios, reserve practical routes for expansion and install metering and secure data interfaces from the outset, because future AI applications depend as much on usable operational data as on computing capacity. Gulf Business Machines, one of the region’s largest IT system integrators, is a good example. Working with Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IT across the application, network and infrastructure layers, GBM has reached its 99.999% uptime target, with more than 100 racks monitored continuously in real time and energy and cooling optimised to reduce operating costs, as it moves its customers toward hybrid cloud. The energy architecture must be designed around how an asset will evolve, instead of highlighting its opening-day demand.
How can the construction industry move beyond sustainability targets and technology pilots to deliver measurable improvements in energy performance, whole-life costs and operational efficiency across the built environment?
Targets are easy to announce and harder to live with. We need to make operational performance part of project acceptance and ongoing accountability, not a line in the sustainability report. JLL’s September 2026 research found that the most efficient buildings in its analysis cost 43–75% less to run annually than the least efficient. That is a compelling reason to assess whole-life value, not just the lowest tender price. Owners should establish a credible baseline, set measurable performance requirements and verify results against weather and occupancy changes. We hold ourselves to the same standard. The Nest, our Gulf headquarters in Dubai, combines building controls, power monitoring and workplace-management technologies, and its energy performance is measured against the site it replaced rather than against an opening-day promise. The wider principle for the construction industry is simple: a target is only the beginning, and transparent measurement is what turns it into a result.
Looking ahead, what capabilities and approaches will be essential for Middle East developers, consultants and contractors to deliver future-ready, energy-resilient infrastructure, and how can Schneider Electric help turn these ambitions into practical project outcomes?
The next competitive advantage in the Gulf will not be technology alone. It will be people who can deliver integrated energy systems and keep improving them after handover. The IEA’s World Energy Employment 2025 survey found that more than half of participating organisations reported critical hiring bottlenecks, and I see the same pressure in every market in our cluster. Developers therefore need to invest in operational capability alongside technology, bringing engineering teams and future operators into decisions early. This matters even more as the region’s energy producers themselves become major builders of digital infrastructure. Schneider Electric’s 2025 partnership with Invest Qatar includes local talent development and customer upskilling in automation and smart-city technologies, supported by our Services Training Centre in Msheireb, and it reflects where my own focus sits: local capabilities and local partnerships across the Gulf. For ADIPEC 2026, the practical challenge is turning investment into assets that trained teams can operate reliably, measure consistently and adapt as demand changes.
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