Meet Petr Hrach, our CTO, who has been part of our story since 1996

Petr Hrach has been part of the Altron story since 1996, long before ALTRON Modular existed as a name. He started as a technician in switchboards construction, production, and decommissioning, then moved into engine generators, in the company that would eventually merge into ALTRON. He’s been there, in one form or another, ever since.

Officially, he joined ALTRON on 1 January 2002, coming up through pre-sales as a product specialist for diesel generators and power centres. From there he became an application engineer, and when ALTRON began profiling itself around larger power blocks and, eventually, data centres, he became one of the company’s data centre consultants.

Nobody believed in it yet

When modular data centres were still a new idea, Petr remembers exactly how hard they were to sell, especially in Europe.

“It wasn’t the right time yet. People couldn’t imagine that IT specialists would have to go somewhere and do the job, where it’s raining, or snowing, or thirty degrees. It was a huge block, something new.”

Early demand was thin and mostly one-off, a scattering of units a year, driven by isolated large projects rather than a real market. One very early example of modular data centre installation was a major one for Telenor in Kosovo.

It was the kind of project that proved the concept could work, but the idea needed to mature.

What shifted the market

Petr places the real tipping point somewhere in the last five to ten years, driven less by new IT technology than by economics. Rising energy prices, rising construction and labour costs, and a basic question every facilities team started asking:

Do we really want this equipment inside the main building, or somewhere else entirely?

He’s watched the numbers behind that shift up close. Rack density used to sit around 1.5–3 kW, growing toward 15 kW, until virtualisation pushed it back down again, to a more efficient 3–5 kW.

Now AI is rewriting the curve completely. Racks that used to run at 10–15 kW are heading toward 30, 50, 150, and with the newest NVIDIA chips, up to 300 kW.

“A few years ago nobody could have imagined that. And suddenly it’s here.”

What do you need to start designing a modular solution?

The number of racks, the kW per rack, and the required availability tier.

Everything else is a conversation, according to our CTO.

ALTRON Modular doesn’t manufacture the components inside its modules, which, in Petr’s view, is exactly the point.

“We’re vendor-neutral. It doesn’t matter to us what brand the components are. We’re genuinely an integrator, and we try to meet the customer’s requirements as close to 100 % as we can.”

It also means design isn’t just engineering but aesthetics as well.

“I always tell investors and customers: a data centre hallway should look like a living room.”

Stainless steel façades that light up at night. Logos integrated into the lighting. Greenery grown over the module – not just to hide what it is, but because it cuts heat gain from the sun, while rainwater and condensate get redirected to keep the planting alive.

Certified during a pandemic

One of the projects Petr is proudest of took place in Prague, mid-COVID, certifying a two-module site to Tier III with the Uptime Institute.

“We were all standing around the module during testing, wearing respirators – didn’t understand each other very well, formed a wider circle outside just to keep our distance. It was something like that that made the whole project terribly complicated.”

They got the certification.

No typical day at ALTRON Modular

Petr Hrach describes some days as firefighting – the calls that pull him out of deep work on a long-term project. Most of it is the daily back-and-forth between the people building the sales proposals and those delivering them, working through the technical details that only surface when a full data hall’s worth of technology has to fit into a module twelve metres long and three metres wide.

“Sometimes I just tighten a screw. And then some evenings I go home satisfied that I actually got something done. Every day is different – that’s probably what keeps this job interesting for me. I’m an electrician and an energy specialist. I stick to things I can touch. The zeros and ones will always be a bit of a mystery to me.”

What he’s built over two decades is the ability to sit exactly in the middle, between what sales promises and what delivery has to build, and make sure the two actually meet.

Outside the data centre

Off the clock, Petr coaches youth rugby, currently a group of 8- to 10-year-olds, three days a week, holding a Level C coaching licence. His own favourite sport, though, is diving, and it’s the one he’s most looking forward to getting back to.

His closing line sums up how he sees the industry is heading:

“Modular construction has a future.”