US Data Centers Face Servers Supply Problems Due To Cold Wave

In the USA there are currently noticeable bottlenecks in the delivery of servers to data centers. The latest cold spell in and around the state of Texas is affecting the plants of several large contract manufacturers.

The servers used in the numerous large US data centres are produced by well-known Asian OEM groups, but they by no means come from the other side of the Pacific. Foxconn, Inventec and Wiwynn, Wistron’s data centre subsidiary, have set up their production facilities in northern Mexico in the border town of Ciudad Juárez in order to be able to deliver more flexibly and quickly.

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The demand is actually so great that the production facilities are to be expanded. At the moment, however, there are problems with maintaining production at all. In any case, it is currently not possible to produce the required quantities, as can be seen from a report by the industry journal DigiTimes, which refers to sources in the supply chain.

No electricity, no free roads

The core problem is that the electricity supply in Mexico is largely based on natural gas power plants. Most of the fuel is imported to Texas. There, however, numerous conveyor systems are frozen due to the cold snap and simply cannot deliver. Large consumers in Mexico in particular are already feeling the effects of the resulting bottleneck.

In addition to the bottlenecks in production itself, there is also stagnation in the delivery of finished systems. Some transports could be diverted. The IT companies have also set up a number of large cloud data centres in Texas, which you could hardly get through. One of the reasons for this was that the US state has rather hot summers and mild winters and, for example, there is hardly any organized winter service for clearing roads. All in all, the contract manufacturers are counting on the fact that deliveries of new servers will return to normal levels in March at the earliest.