With years of experience in the tech industry, Nirupa Chander, Senior Vice President, Secure Power & Data Centers, International Operations, Schneider Electric, shares insights into her career progression from her early days as an engineer to her current role leading a global team of over 700 individuals. She also discusses the challenges and opportunities she has encountered and her vision for the future.
Congratulations on the new role as Senior Vice President. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your career to date, and how you came into this industry.
I’m an engineer, first and foremost. I’ve worked for over 20 years in the electrical industry.
I graduated from Gujarat University with an Engineering degree in Electronics and Communications, then worked in India for five years, Australia for 10, and five in Singapore before moving to the Middle East. And I have now been in Dubai for two-and-a-half years.
I’ve worked across a lot of the geographies that I will be covering now leading Schneider Electric’s Secure Power International Region. This will also include South America, and so I’m looking forward to this new role.
In your new leadership role, what are you excited about achieving with an international team of over 700 people?
Coming from an energy background, I find it fascinating how discussions about data centres now inevitably involve energy due to the increasing digitalisation and the resulting demand.
My journey into data centres began with electrical distribution infrastructure, particularly connecting hyperscale data centres in Asia Pacific, and now in the Middle East and Africa. As large-scale data centres are on the rise in these regions, my experience in the energy sector is proving valuable, especially in discussions around energy efficiency and sustainability.
Despite my primary focus on energy, I am eager to learn and contribute more for the enterprise IT ecosystem, partners and alliances, particularly with the growing importance of AI and its transformative potential.
My early career experiences as a controls and automation engineer linked me to IT infrastructure and hardware, showing me how energy and data are increasingly intertwined. Working on microgrids in Australia highlighted the complexity of balancing the grid with energy storage technology and renewables – insights now applicable to creating sustainable data centres.
It is exciting to see the strong coupling between data and energy, and I am excited about applying my knowledge and skills to this evolving field, especially with the anticipated growth in AI and its potential impact on the industry.
As you moved from pure engineering into more managerial roles, how did you find that transition? How did you expand your skills as you progressed?
My strategy has always been to stay directionally aware of my goals and work hard to achieve them.
Starting as a project engineer, I took on a US$5 million project and approached it with a CEO mindset, focusing on scope, budget and customer satisfaction. Managing project teams and later operational roles allowed me to gain diverse experience.
My goal was to run a profit and loss (P&L), so I shifted from engineering to sales and business development, acquiring a well-rounded business acumen. Over time, I took on regional responsibilities and moved into corporate roles, continuously adding tools and experience to my repertoire. There was no magic recipe, as such.
It is well known that traditional industries such as energy and data infrastructure could benefit from more gender equality. What have been some of your experiences where you have broken the mould, or successes that can inspire future generations?
It is hard not to notice the lack of gender balance in engineering generally.
There’s always the excuse that not enough women engineers graduate, that there’s just a smaller pool. If you do the research and the analysis, the bigger problem is the leaky pipeline.
Women drop off at critical points in their career and it happens in nearly every geography in every culture. Women are dropping off at critical junctures of their career, whether it is linked decisions around family or responsibility for ageing relatives, you find that women are not sustaining their career paths.
A long-term career path requires a lot of investment of time and effort, and when you’ve got conflicting responsibilities it’s hard. I think as an industry, we need to focus more on retention of the women that we bring into the organisation rather than only focusing on the intake. That’s where I think Schneider Electric and its metrics are doing a great job.
We’ve got an ambition around our sustainability impact, which is having 50% women in hiring, 40% women in front line management, and 30% women in leadership teams by 2025. We are well on our way to meeting those targets. There is still work to do, and we need to develop more women into leadership positions. If we’re going to solve this issue, it is about enabling women to succeed in corporate careers.
From your time in the energy sector, what are your impressions of how the digital infrastructure industry operates in comparison?
One phenomenon that is obvious is the power demand from accelerated computing is near exponential.
Just six years ago, AFCOM’s State of the Data Center Report recorded the average rack density at 6kW, this year’s report says it is now at 12kW, with the majority (55%) of respondents stating that they expect further increases in the next 12 months. That multiplies the power increase within a single rack which, when accumulated into an overall system, grows exponentially. With AI, that density could reach 100kW, as per our new reference designs.
We need to be able to serve this power from the generation side and enable the build out of all this IT infrastructure, but we have to do it in a sustainable way. Therefore, there’s a critical paradigm and situation in the industry today.
I think the challenge in the industry today is that we’ve done fantastically well in developing these amazing chips that can do a lot of things, moving AI ever closer to general intelligence with these high-capacity chips. But at the same time, they need a lot of power. They need a lot of cooling systems, and that’s where I think the engineering world of data and energy are really starting to converge.
We have got to enable this growth with better efficiency.
What are your views on some of the major challenges facing the digital infrastructure industry, such as sustainability, energy efficiency, scaling up for AI demand, etc?
Looking at all of these challenges, there isn’t a one company solution. It’s going to have to be done by partnership. We have partnerships with the likes of NVIDIA, which wasn’t on the radar say a decade ago. We are learning how to design the infrastructure that surrounds this new generation of application. This is new for the industry, so you have to be able to do it with partnerships, and new kinds of partnerships.
The way it has been characterised is that NVIDIA is the jet and Schneider Electric is the aircraft carrier. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
I mentioned already about the challenges of energy and doing things more efficiently – and doing it with as many green electrons as possible.
Another challenge is where do you build out these data centres in a way that they’re most efficient and ensuring that there is the transmission from the grid, and the infrastructure to support that. We’re seeing linked opportunities at Schneider Electric on the grid infrastructure side, because where there is a big data centre hub being created, there’s also a lot of energy infrastructure that needs to be created around it to support it. For example, in UAE, to support its AI strategy, its building a whole new power grid with 5,000 MW of power.
Given your unique experience of being in the energy industry for so long and now expanding your leadership into the data centre sphere, what are the topics you are passionate about or want to tackle?
There are a lot of lessons that can be transferred from the energy side of things.
Efficiency and safety by design principles for these complex applications is the one thing that can be applied from the energy sector.
On balance, there is probably more to learn for the energy sector from the data centre industry in terms of speed. I can see that the energy sector is finally starting to transform in terms of speed and how this is being seen with utilities, as with the UAE example. In the race for AI, there’s probably more cross learning opportunities. As we learnt to support demand, we will also learn in both industries how to apply it to drive efficiency, optimisation and transformation.
All the process industries and energy infrastructure are starting to look for opportunities to leverage AI use cases to improve the sustainability or efficiency of their own operations. There’s a wealth of opportunity there, which again would drive demand for more digital infrastructure around the region.
Use cases on how AI could help improve processes or efficiencies, whether it’s organisational efficiency, organisational processes, or production/ manufacturing processes. In renewable energy plants too, it can be applied to forecasting. For example, how to improve the load, and demand forecasting in a grid. These are all leveraging AI.
There is a convergence here that means the tools and technologies can be spread across industries.
Looking forward in the near term, what do you see as the priorities for data centre owners and operators?
Firstly, it is having the right partnerships in order to deliver these unprecedented level of deployment plans. This will not happen unless we’re working in new innovative business models and new partnership approaches to achieve the ambition and the opportunity.
The next challenge is the energy and sustainability issue, and how do you build out these data centres in a more sustainable way.
Of course, regulation is a constant theme too. My impression is that regulation is in some ways driving more local/ regional data centres to ensure data sovereignty. For example, here in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and in the UAE, there’s a push around keeping data within the country.
We’re going to see a build out plan beyond the normal hubs of data centre deployments into a more local context.
Is there anything else you would like to leave our readers with as a final thought?
Schneider Electric is doing a lot of work around the Electricity 4.0 concept of digitalising the whole energy infrastructure, with AI managing and optimising for efficiency and sustainability.
We are looking at the big picture of grid-to-chip and chip-to-chiller to make sure we have solutions at every level.
There have been announcements just recently of new reference designs with NVIDIA, around the new GB200 NVL72 system, that are supported by our own Galaxy VXL UPS, the industry’s most compact, high-density power protection system for AI, data centre and large-scale electrical workloads. We are also building out our capabilities and Schneider Electric recently signed an agreement to acquire a majority stake in the Motivair Corporation, a key global provider of advanced liquid cooling solutions. This will enhance our liquid cooling portfolio and strengthening our expertise in direct-to-chip liquid cooling and high-capacity thermal solutions.
Our Executive Vice President of Secure Power Division and Center Business at Schneider Electric, Pankaj Sharma, put it best when he said: “The energy and environmental impact of AI is growing at unprecedented pace, and it’s paramount we bend the energy curve downward by finding new ways to decarbonise data centres and the digital infrastructure.”
That is the approach at Schneider Electric. We are committed to pushing boundaries, setting new standards and shaping the future of AI, whilst protecting the environment. This is the strategic approach I described from grid to chip, to the chiller and beyond.
The aim is to be a complete ecosystem partner for everyone to achieve that aim of responsible growth supporting a liveable future.
That’s very exciting for me as I take up this new role.
