For gigawatt-scale AI developments, the developer may be involved with substations, transmission interconnections, generation plants, batteries or other behind-the-meter infrastructure long before servers arrive. Solaris now describes its overall portfolio as including generation, distribution, installation and commissioning, aftermarket support, and operations and maintenance. The arrival of companies with roots in energy and heavy industrial services suggests that the data center supplier base itself is changing as projects begin to resemble large industrial infrastructure developments. The Pattern Extends Across the Services Stack The transactions involving T5, Limbach, JK Technology Services and Solaris are hardly isolated. A wider wave of acquisitions and partnerships is pushing equipment manufacturers, contractors, engineering firms and specialist service providers toward broader roles across the data center lifecycle. Vertiv provided perhaps the clearest parallel in September, announcing an agreement to acquire UtilityInnovation Group for approximately $1.45 billion in cash, with additional consideration tied to performance. UIG brings microgrid controls, onsite-generation orchestration, specialized switchgear and behind-the-meter power architecture. The deal also extends a broader 2026 acquisition push by Vertiv that has added liquid-cooling specialist Strategic Thermal Labs, chiller manufacturer ThermoKey and prefabricated infrastructure provider Bmarko as the company builds out more of the AI data center infrastructure stack. Vertiv described the move as extending its portfolio upstream from the critical power and cooling systems inside the facility toward the grid interconnection and onsite generation itself — effectively creating a path from power source to chip. Days later, Flex announced a $4.4 billion agreement to acquire EPC Power, adding grid-forming and power-conversion technology designed for data centers, utility-scale energy storage and microgrids. EPC Power’s platform includes rectifiers and DC-DC conversion for emerging 800-volt data center architectures, with solid-state transformer development also planned. The company says it has more than 15 GW deployed across 62 countries and expects its annual U.S.