Phill Lawson-Shanks has more than 25 years of experience identifying new opportunities for further growth of leading data center infrastructure, network architecture, and cloud solutions in the US and abroad. As Chief Innovation Officer at Aligned, Lawson-Shanks is responsible for identifying, developing, and implementing innovative strategies and technologies to drive business growth and maintain Aligned’s competitive advantage.
Prior to joining Aligned, Lawson-Shanks served as Chief Innovation Officer at EdgeConneX, where he was instrumental in driving strategies focused on creating the next generation of network edge-based data centers for the digital content ecosystem. Throughout his career, he has also served in numerous senior executive-level positions at Virtacore, Alcatel-Lucent, Savvis (now CenturyLink Technology Solutions), and MCI (now Verizon Digital Media Services). He currently holds eight active technology patents and serves on the Board of Directors for Netrality Data Centers, the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA) Advisory Board, and the Nomad Futurist Foundation Board.
Since joining Aligned in 2017, you’ve successfully positioned the company at the From Aligned’s patented cooling technology and approach to construction, to sustainability, talent development, and community engagement, Aligned is setting a gold standard in innovation. How have you been able to foster this culture of continuous improvement, operational excellence, and creating long-term value for stakeholders?
Innovation has been at the core of Aligned since its inception, and that’s one of the things that attracted me to the company—the belief that data centers must be as efficient as possible to support the evolving technology we rely on every day. Consider this: Clients come to us primarily for security and reliability. They entrust their businesses to our facilities and naturally assume that all systems housed within them will remain operational and will continue to provide the necessary power and cooling. However, across the industry, the majority of data center architecture has not adapted to keep pace with technology. My good friend, Peter Gross, often says that the data center business loves innovation as long as it’s ten years old, and I believe that idea highlights our collective need to deliver resilience and reliability. That said, if we equate this concept to automobiles, in the early days of the Model T Ford, we started improving road infrastructure to support this new technology. If we had maintained those single-lane tracks while continuing to innovate, we would encounter bottlenecks everywhere. We wouldn’t be able to sustain the architectural framework of the automobile industry and transportation as a whole. So, at Aligned, we take the position that technology is continually pushing the boundaries of the data centers we need to build for our customers, their platforms, and their clients. Returning to the transportation analogy, we are constantly looking ahead, designing and building for the next wave. It’s as if we’re anticipating the flying car revolution. We must consider what we need to do for the next five, ten years and beyond to ensure our designs and infrastructure can withstand the test of time for technology deployments we have yet to conceive. If you limit yourself to a legacy design mindset, you will never realize the full potential of technology and what it can deliver for society today and tomorrow. Therefore, we examine what we can do with cooling, power distribution, and the very fabric of the buildings, as well as how we design, operate, and locate them—every aspect is guided by this mindset.
Rather than looking at innovation in terms of siloed features or departments, innovation is built into all areas of Aligned’s business. What does “integrated innovation” mean to you, and how does that inform your business decisions and strategy?
Invention is a fantastic process, but it takes a long time because you’re creating something brand new. Innovation is adapting existing technologies and moving the dial. So, within our infrastructure, within the data center business, you have peaks and troughs of innovation seeking to respond to business needs. For example, cooling has been on the forefront of everybody’s mind for the last several years. At Aligned, we have our Delta Cube cooling technology with the ability to push a higher volume of air at a lower velocity, which increases the air’s capacity to absorb the heat. From the outset of the company, we were able to accommodate 50kW racks, which allowed our clients to deploy more equipment in fewer racks, requiring less physical infrastructure and occupying less floor space.
With ongoing advances in GPUs and high-performance computing, we require more than just air-based cooling. To address this, we designed and launched DeltaFlow~ earlier this year. The combination of our Delta Cube Arrays (air cooling) and DeltaFlow~ (liquid cooling) enables our clients to deploy over 350 kW per cabinet. Since we have always engineered our buildings with a closed liquid loop, we can effortlessly integrate DeltaFlow~ alongside our Delta Cube Arrays (for the current 70/30 – 80/20 liquid/air cooling) or use it independently to support fully liquid-cooled rack systems or immersion tanks. Our data centers are designed to provide clients with a clear path to the future, regardless of how their technology is likely to evolve.
You have said that “a new breed of data centers is required to keep up with the demands we are all placing on the services these facilities support.” How is Aligned engineering this new breed?
For the last several years, we’ve all designed and built to address the requirements of large cloud deployments as well as the needs of highly sophisticated enterprise clients. Now we’re moving into this new realm of GPU clusters, which have an entirely different set of parameters we need to consider. Locations have been fairly predictable: We’ve always had the edge and the core. The hyperscalers have looked for areas where land and power are cost-effective. They built enormous capacity there, but you still need that low latency handoff, so we’ll always have the edge.
Edge computing is evolving because we want to bring this new breed of technology—the output of all the large language models developed over the last 18 months—closer to the edge. We are witnessing the first phase of this new technological breed, agent-based models, entering the market. Regardless of the industry or client base these Agentic AI models serve, they must be in seamless proximity to cloud architectures, which act as the data sources from which they derive, resolve, and ultimately deliver their responses to clients.
And because of the low latency requirements, we are going to see this resurgence of the edge. However, this Agentic AI Edge will require more power and more cooling to accommodate the increased densities. This next wave will challenge the legacy design mindset – at the core and the edge. In order to compete and support the AI leaders and their deployment strategies, the data center industry must think differently!
Where we designed our data centers to have that expandability, as technology changed, so can we—our clients have a very clear path to the future without thinking about leasing more space.
Aligned has partnered with several key investors, manufacturers, and technology providers (to name a few) to support infrastructure development. What role do you see strategic partnerships playing in our industry’s ability to stay ahead of the curve?
The right partnerships are vital. If you’re not at the table, engaged in those discussions about what’s coming next, then you’re always going to be in reaction mode. To fulfill our clients’ needs, we have to be part of those conversations, and we work with the most amazing companies on the planet. Whether they are suppliers, infrastructure developers, or investment partners, they give us the flexibility to think ahead and move accordingly. We couldn’t run this business without those relationships and that trust we have from our partners.
With data centers continually facing mounting pressures from consumers, stakeholders, and the planet itself, what key issues do you see the industry facing in the coming years, and where should industry players be looking for solutions?
We’re not only looking at how we can use new technologies to mitigate the heat and cost of infrastructure deployments, but also doing some very aggressive ESG reporting. Through this reporting and working with various organizations, I began thinking about Scope 3 emissions and the embodied carbon of all the equipment – and just how hard it has been to track historically. I’ve uncovered a piece of technology, an open architecture called OriginMark™, which we now utilize across all our platforms. Essentially, for the last four years, we’ve been tagging all of our mechanical equipment, electrical equipment, buildings—everything within the portfolio of our data centers—and working with our suppliers to request the carbon footprint for that product – however they’re reporting it. We combine and rationalize all of their reporting architectures and compute the greenhouse gas emissions for the devices, and are then able to report Scope 3 emissions to our clients. We even have the first data center certified as OCP Ready™. In everything we do, we look at how we can optimize our buildings and design for the future. I firmly believe we all should be motivated to be this thorough as it will benefit us all—and our planet—in the long run.
What’s one of the greatest opportunities for innovation today in the data center space?
I think it’s further optimization, especially around carbon-saving materials and processes. As we see workloads rise, we have started to utilize AI tools to further optimize our cooling technology, responding, predicting and accommodating the extraordinary peaks and troughs we are witnessing. This past year, we have needed to anticipate more wet bulb changes, humidity fluctuations, and atmospheric pressure and temperature variations as well as the increased loads that our clients are requiring from the architecture. We need to understand how we can continue to optimize all of the elements of our cooling system—loops, chillers, air flow, etc.— That optimization is both a huge advantage and a challenge, and something that we’re addressing readily today with sophisticated AI engines and models.
Why is innovation and being nimble so core to Aligned’s mission and vision since its inception, and why is it so important in the future?
During the span of my career alone, technology and the architecture supporting it have changed significantly. If you think back to 2007 when the iPhone was launched, no one—except maybe Steve Jobs—could have anticipated the enormous change that highly connected, highly portable smart devices would bring to society. We witnessed the birth of entirely new companies and economic processes. Think ride-share, instant mobile content creation and sharing, to name just two. I believe we’re having another iPhone moment with the launch of these new AI models, and it’s really difficult to predict what new businesses and industries will evolve in their wake.
Data centers are the engine of those fourth, fifth, and future industrial revolutions, and it’s impossible to predict the full extent of their impact. So, unless we have an adaptive infrastructure—the ability to pivot in terms of how we design, how we deploy, how we manage, and where we build—it’s like having a single highway for all the traffic that wants to run over it. We need to anticipate where technology is going to take us and then design our infrastructure accordingly.
