Data Center Blog #1: Critical Facilities Are the New Control Point for Data Center Performance

As data centers scale to support AI, cloud, and high-density compute, the operating conversation is changing. Though IT infrastructure remains critical, the biggest risks to uptime, cost, and sustainability sit within the facilities stack: power, cooling, water, and supporting utilities. 

This shift creates a major opportunity. 

For many operators, the limiting factor is no longer a lack of data, but the inability to turn fragmented facilities information into timely decisions across sites, systems, and teams. BMS/SCADA, DCIM, historians, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge often live in separate places, making it difficult to detect issues early, optimize energy performance, and standardize best practices across an expanding footprint.  

This is where Seeq Enterprise and Seeq Intelligence come in. 

Together, they give data center operators a modern foundation for critical facilities monitoring and energy management, one that helps teams move from reactive troubleshooting and alarm overload to monitoring-by-exception, faster investigation, and AI-assisted action at enterprise scale. 

The challenge: more data, more complexity, more consequences

Data centers are adding more megawatts, more sensors, more assets, and more sites, but facilities teams are not scaling at the same rate. The results range from alarm floods to manual trending to slow root-cause analysis, and too much reliance on a small number of experts. 

At the same time, the business stakes are rising. Internal Seeq modeling for medium to large sites points to inflated annual electricity spend, with cooling often representing roughly half of the facility’s energy load. Industry events focused on data center operations are now centered on the same pressures: reducing PUE and water use, improving cooling efficiency, strengthening resilience, and building more credible sustainability reporting. 

In other words, critical facilities are no longer just a support function. They are a strategic lever for margin, reliability, and growth. 

Why Seeq Enterprise fits the data center operating model

Seeq Enterprise is built to turn local engineering insight into repeatable, enterprise-scale operational impact. It unifies context, subject matter expertise, and operational data into workflows that can be scaled across fleets of assets and complex processes. 

 This matters because the same core equipment and systems appear repeatedly across data center sites: 

• Chillers
• Cooling towers 
• CRAH/CRAC units 
• Pumps 
• Compressors 
• Heat exchangers 
• UPS-supporting systems 
• Air handlers and related HVAC infrastructure 

Instead of treating every event as a one-off investigation, Seeq Enterprise helps operators codify what “good” looks like, define the conditions that matter, and scale that logic across similar assets.  

With Seeq Vantage and enterprise scaling capabilities, teams can standardize monitors, prioritize exceptions, investigate faster, continuously improving how issues are handled over time.  This creates a more effective operating model for critical facilities: 

• Earlier detection of degradation and abnormal behavior on equipment such as chillers, pumps, compressors, and fans 

• Faster triage and root-cause analysis through integrated investigation workflows combing time-series, events, and unstructured contextual data 

• More consistent monitoring across sites by shifting from ad hoc analysis to monitor-by-exception at scale 

• Better use of engineering time by reducing manual data prep, repetitive reporting, and leveraging integrated Agentic AI workflows to increase productivity 

For data center operators trying to expand without multiplying operational complexity, this is crucial. 

There is already substantial evidence that this model delivers significant value. At Intel, Seeq has been deployed across all of their wafer fabs to support facilities condition-based monitoring, predictive maintenance, and energy performance management. Per their recently published white paper, From Automation to Autonomy – Agentic AI Is Transforming Intel Facilities Operations, Intel has reported 30% faster anomaly detection in ultrapure water (UPW) systems, 15% energy efficiency increase in chilled water plants, and a 15–20% reduction in technician workload through AI-enabled workflows. Uptime is improved, operation costs are reduced, and critical facilities expertise is maintained across sites.  

Gain operational advantage

The future of data center operations isn’t going to be defined by more dashboards, but by how well operators can connect data, expertise, SME knowledge, and AI into a repeatable decision-making engine. 

With Seeq Enterprise and Seeq Intelligence, data center operators can move beyond fragmented monitoring toward a more scalable model for critical facilities performance, energy management, and decision intelligence — exactly where the next wave of operational advantage will be won. 

To learn more about how Seeq can support the data center operating model, stop by our booth May 27th – 28th at the 6th Annual High-Density AI Data Center Infrastructure Summit in Reston, Virginia.