DCF Tours: Aligned Data Centers PHX-01, Phoenix, Arizona

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DCF Tours: Aligned Data Centers PHX-01, Phoenix, Arizona

Where Energy Efficiency Meets Cost Reduction Energy efficiency is a cornerstone of Aligned’s strategy, with initiatives aimed at minimizing energy use while maximizing cooling effectiveness. “It’s all about maximizing cooling, minimizing the energy,” Lawson-Shanks stated. Advanced technologies, such as QR codes for equipment maintenance, streamline operations and ensure accountability. “Most of our devices will all […]

Where Energy Efficiency Meets Cost Reduction

Energy efficiency is a cornerstone of Aligned’s strategy, with initiatives aimed at minimizing energy use while maximizing cooling effectiveness. “It’s all about maximizing cooling, minimizing the energy,” Lawson-Shanks stated.

Advanced technologies, such as QR codes for equipment maintenance, streamline operations and ensure accountability. “Most of our devices will all have QR codes,” explained Patton. “A lot of our maintenance and everything that we’re doing is all going to be QR-based. Operations would scan that and pull up any kind of work document or anything that needs to happen on that piece of equipment.”

The company’s focus on cost reduction and dynamic cooling systems has also driven innovation. Lawson-Shanks describes a transition to more efficient motors and dynamic cooling: “With this turbine…we’ve changed to a different engine as well, a motor, which is a new PCB printed motor. So it’s even more efficient, has more longevity, and less energy usage.”

Walking through the the facility and viewing more of its equipment, I learn how PHX-01’s dynamic systems monitor heat generation in real-time and adjust cooling accordingly. “These systems would detect the heat being generated, and then our cooling system would slow down a bit because we didn’t need to cool it so much. And then when it detects the heat, it would spin back again. So it’s totally dynamic and closely coupled to the load,” explained Lawson-Shanks.

Innovation Highlights

PHX-01’s sustainability bona fides are further underscored by Aligned’s device tracking and recycling processes. The aforementioned QR codes on the facility’s equipment provide detailed information about each device’s specifications, when end-of-life components are disassembled and repurposed.

“When this is going end of life, we can determine how much copper, aluminum, steel, and if there’s anything that can have a second life, we appropriately disassemble and give it to an ITAD or something like that to reuse the components,” Lawson-Shanks explained.

Talk turns to how Aligned’s commitment to innovation also extends to energy storage and emerging battery technologies. The company has adopted Lithium-Ion technology and is exploring alternatives such as sodium batteries. “We switched to Lithium-Ion from the very beginning. With lithium, titanate oxide… we can have the cells smaller, closer together, but still be lithium,” Lawson-Shanks remarked.

He also highlights the potential of Prussian blue-type sodium ion batteries for their longevity, such as those provided by Natron Energy: “We’re looking at some interesting sodium batteries coming up… particularly the Prussian blue type,” he said. “It’s heavier, but the cycle time and longevity are key.”

Looking Toward the Future

The tour concludes with a discussion on future power utility expansions for the campus, with utility provider Arizona Public Service (APS) currently building additional infrastructure to support the facility.

“APS is expanding it for us. They’re in the process of building the yard right now and then they’ll start dropping gear. By Q1, Q2 of next year, we should be online with APS,” Patton stated.

Overall, Aligned Data Centers’ Phoenix data center campus exemplifies a forward-thinking approach to facility design and operation, balancing historical preservation with technological innovation. Through adaptive reuse, energy efficiency, and sustainability initiatives, the company sets a benchmark for the industry while preparing for the future of high-density computing.

Following the tour, DCF was invited to ask follow-up questions and continue the conversation informally, reflecting the company’s approachable and collaborative ethos.

Conversation with Aligned Data Centers CIO Phill Lawson-Shanks

Data Center Frontier’s correspondent and Aligned Data Centers Chief Innovation Officer Phill Lawson-Shanks then repaired to one of the site’s spacious conference rooms for conversation on cutting-edge trends shaping today’s data center industry, where Phill shared his insights into sustainability, technological challenges with AI, and community-focused initiatives.

Evolution of Hyperscalers and Sustainability

Phill began by highlighting the proactive steps Aligned Data Centers has taken to stay ahead in the hyperscale game. “Several years ago, we started pre-buying our long-lead items like generators and switchgear,” he explained. “We now have one and a half gigawatts in inventory. To put that in perspective, that’s 22 miles of generators.”

This forward-thinking approach allows the company to maintain a competitive edge, deploying an impressive 20 megawatts of capacity each month. “We’re running at about a million man-hours of construction every month,” Phill added, underscoring the speed and scale of their operations.

Sustainability is also a focal point. Phill described Aligned’s efforts to reduce embodied carbon by using innovative materials like green concrete and reducing Portland cement content. “We’re constantly looking at materials,” he noted. “We’re even exploring solutions like Blue Planet, which creates limestone from CO2 to incorporate back into concrete.”

He also noted that Aligned’s commitment to sustainability also extends to exploring alternative fuels like natural gas and hydrogen to power operations more cleanly.

Data Center Builds and GPU Clusters

As the discussion shifted to data center builds, Phill emphasized Aligned’s adaptability to client needs. “Our speed of build has been a competitive advantage,” he stated. This agility includes deploying modular systems like 6-megawatt data halls and exploring new technologies, such as 3D printing of concrete.

The conversation turned to the burgeoning importance of GPU clusters for AI infrastructure, with Phill highlighting the data center industry’s transition to liquid cooling. “Clients are increasingly moving to GPU clusters. We’re collaborating with Nvidia, Intel, and others to stay ahead of this technological shift,” he stated.

He mentioned how one of Aligned Data Centers’ Chicago facilities holds the distinction of being the first OCP-certified hyperscale data center, a testament to the growing role of open standards.

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Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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