By Nicholas G. Miller

Power management company Eaton has formed a collaboration with modular data center start-up Flexnode to install pre-fabricated data centers that are quicker to build than on-site developments.

Eaton will provide power backup, racks and cable management technologies for Flexnode's data center modules. Eaton also led Flexnode's $30 million Series A funding round that closed this year, Flexnode told The Wall Street Journal.

The companies will offer data halls from 3.5 to 35 megawatts and enable multiple structures to be deployed together on one site.

Eaton and Flexnode told The Wall Street Journal that pre-fabricated modular data centers allow for faster deployment, which is critical for AI companies racing to build out the infrastructure required to train and run their models.

Flexnode Chief Executive Andrew Lindsey said in an interview the speed of the data center construction is especially important given the rate at which chip technology is advancing.

Hyperscalers are focused on "the economic advantages of deploying the GPUs as soon as they're released rather than two or three years later as they're closing in economic obsolescence," Lindsey said.

Additionally, the pace of chip innovation is causing significant delays in traditional data center build-outs, with new technology forcing builders to rejigger designs, Lindsey said. "We don't really have the ability to see what the AI facility is going to require three, four or five years from now," he said. "Accommodating that really relies on us having a level of flexibility through the design and delivery."

Lindsey said demand is growing for smaller data centers that can be deployed on individual companies' premises to help them use the large-scale AI models, rather than the massive sites being built now. "In order to do that, we're going to need an exponentially greater number of data centers," Lindsey said.

Modular data centers also allow for flexibility in capacity, with operators able to add more structures when they need more computing power. "The modular element allows us to scale between what that site needs, versus what it's maybe scaling up to over time," Linsey Miller, a senior vice president at Eaton, said in an interview.

But Miller cautioned that modular data centers likely wouldn't take over the whole market. "We'll have a way to build data centers the traditional way and if we have land and power provisioned in certain sites, we can build it the way that we have," Miller said. "I don't think it means that this becomes the new architecture entirely. I think it means that it becomes an essential option."

Write to Nicholas G. Miller at nicholas.miller@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 28, 2026 08:22 ET (13:22 GMT)

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