CHRIS BUTLER
DATA CENTRE INVESTMENT
“ Operators need seamless coordination between their compute and power systems,” Chris notes.“ No data centre area is immune from the pressure to innovate faster and Flex is uniquely positioned with an end-to-end view of the industry’ s requirements across compute, power, and cooling infrastructure.”
Flex is currently one of the only suppliers with vertically integrated system rack capabilities to deliver services including fabricating sheet metal frames, enclosures to the design, the manufacturing of servers, storage, racks, switches, power shelves and liquid cooling systems.
“ This integration allows for optimised designs that address the interdependent challenges of computing, power and cooling,”
CHRIS BUTLER
TITLE: PRESIDENT, EMBEDDED & CRITICAL POWER BUSINESS
COMPANY: FLEX
Chris oversees Flex’ s strategy, planning, development and execution for the Embedded and Critical Power markets, managing its data centre innovation roadmap. His teams also address escalating power consumption for the data centre market.
Chris explains.“ Flex’ s strategy spans the entire power delivery chain and helps customers manage complexity while improving efficiency, reliability and sustainability across their data centre operations.” These include:
Direct-to-Chip Liquid Cooling: Adoption of single-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling is continuing to surge. With the ability to cool GPUs at over 3,000W, JetCool’ s microconvective cooling technology has more than enough headroom to accommodate the most advanced AI servers.
Advanced Power Modules: As AI chips are expected to demand up to 1500W peak power, Flex expects continued innovation in embedded power products. The company has intermediate bus converters( IBCs) that deliver highefficiency power distribution to GPUs and custom ASICs.
Chris suggests that many of these new modules are ideally suited for direct-to-chip cooling customised for each processor design. It also has capabilities to help ensure data centres can scale to meet the rising demands of AI-driven workloads.
Modular Data Centres: To support rapid AI expansion, modular data centers – that are pre-integrated with compute, power and cooling components – could strand to offer a fast, scalable way to deploy new capacity, reducing time-to-market for AI infrastructure.
88 August 2025