Power Assemblies Company Switches to Be Used in Amazon’s New Mexico Facility

As most people know by now, Amazon is the world’s largest and fastest growing retailer with over 50% of the B2C market. The rapid growth puts a strain on their fulfillment warehouses and data centers requiring new facilities to be built constantly. These facilities are being built all over the country, including several on the west coast due to the relatively stable climate. The data centers require back up power through generators that have enough capacity to handle power requirements roughly equivalent to the normal, or line power from the utilities. This redundancy is called N+1 and is designed to maintain service levels in case of power failure. The larger generators are connected to a primary disconnect which can be an emergency power switchboard or panelboard, then distributed to various locations throughout the building. The size of these generators ranges from 1 megawatt up to 3 megawatts. Some areas of the building require their own dedicated generator, which are typically less than 100KW at 208V three phase. These generators have cam-lok cables connected to the incoming cam-loks of a disconnect panel, and the outgoing cables are protected by the internal thermal magnetic circuit breaker. More information on Amazon’s operational support systems for data centers can be found on their website at https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-center/controls/ Recently Power Assemblies was contracted to build 16 of these disconnect panels, which are called Company Switches, through one of its distribution partners, Graybar Electric, in New Mexico. As you can imagine, Amazon is serious about the back up power for these facilities. A data center contains between 50,000 and 80,000 servers that host Amazon’s business through amazon.com, as well as the servers for many companies own online stores through its Amazon Web Service offering, or AWS. AWS is the largest provider of in the cloud solutions by a long shot, with over 30% market share as of December 2017. The products used in these data centers must meet very stringent specification requirements, including the servers themselves, the structure of the building as well as all the electrical components powering the facility. Power Assemblies Company Switches easily passed these requirements. They are UL891 listed for the US and Canada and each switch is electrically and mechanically tested after production before shipping. In addition to the Amazon New Mexico Facility, Power Assemblies was recently chosen to provide over 20 Company Switches to the new Caesars Palace Convention Center addition in Las Vegas, Nevada and Chris Angels new stage, also in Las Vegas, Nevada.