Modular data centres: out of the box

Beijing's order this week to unwind Meta's $2bn purchase of Manus has produced predictable gloom about Chinese AI exits. The wrong story. The trade is not who buys Chinese software. It is who builds the boxes that all software runs on. Forecasts of US data centre capex run to $650bn for 2026 alone. About half of that nominal pipeline will not be built on time. The binding constraint is not capital but the unglamorous metalwork of grey space: high-voltage transformers with five-year lead times, switchgear, batteries, diesel gensets. The US imported more than 8,000 high-power transformers from China in the first ten months of 2025, up from fewer than 1,500 in all of 2022. Reshoring rhetoric has not produced reshored kit. Enter the modular prefab vendors. Companies such as Shanghai-based EPG manufacture the entire grey-space stack — transformers, UPS, batteries, cooling, fire suppression, gensets — as containerised units, shipped from factories in Malaysia. Country-of-origin rules treat…