Fire Fighting Required Questions under the Calculation Force

Under the sweeping wave of AI, the construction of global data centers has entered an unprecedented period of surge, and the demand for power supply equipment such as lithium batteries, energy storage systems, and solid-state transformers (SST) has risen accordingly. However, while the industry is betting heavily on computing infrastructure, a hidden security crisis is accelerating.

According to incomplete statistics, since 2024, global data center security accidents have erupted in a blowout-from the overnight paralysis of 647 government systems in South Korea and the permanent damage of 858TB of data, to the forced suspension of global futures trading in the US Chicagoland for more than 11 hours, to the "rollover" of leading cloud manufacturers such as Aliyun, Google and AWS, the impact of the accident has been interrupted from the business of a single enterprise, all the way to national government paralysis, the global financial market shutdown.

Lithium battery thermal runaway, electrical short circuit, liquid cooling leakage-these three major safety reefs have surfaced in the global data center cluster. How to build a stable and reliable safety protection system has changed from a technical multiple-choice question to a must-answer question related to the survival of the industry.

Since 2025, there have been five data center accidents involving UPS lithium batteries, involving many well-known companies such as Aliyun and X Company, among which the accident of South Korea's National Information Resources Management Institute is the most serious. In addition, in March 2025, the Equinix data center in Pakistan and the telecommunications data center in Cairo, Egypt in July 2025, all caused fires due to short circuits in wires and fires in electrical equipment.

Once the lithium battery thermal runaway fire is triggered, it is difficult to be blocked by external fire extinguishing means, and there is a very high risk of re-ignition. For example, the fire watering in the Singapore accident has not been completely extinguished for 24 hours, and the battery in the Daejeon accident in South Korea still deflagrated spontaneously after 40 minutes of power failure, all of which confirm this feature. It is also worth noting that in the data center, electrical short circuit generated by the arc may also trigger a chain reaction of adjacent batteries, resulting in a serious fire. For example, in July 2025, Egypt and Cairo telecommunication data center building fire, the preliminary investigation pointed to the short circuit of the electric wire.

For Shengsida, who focuses on the field of energy storage and fire fighting, the most direct revelation of this series of accidents is that the line of defense must be pushed forward from "fire fighting" to "discovery". The lesson of Daejeon in South Korea also reminds another thing that is often ignored: the battery still spontaneously deflagrates after 40 minutes of power failure, indicating that power failure is not equal to safety. The monitoring, exhaust and fire fighting circuits must have independent power sources and continue to work for more than several hours after the main system is shut down. The real tricky thing is after thermal runaway. The fire that Singapore has not completely extinguished after 24 hours of watering shows that the role of conventional gas fire extinguishing in this scene is overestimated: heptafluoropropane and perfluorohexanone can suppress open flames within tens of seconds, but they cannot take away the chemical heat continuously generated inside the battery core, and the concentration of the agent will reignite as soon as it decays. Therefore, the technical route basically converges to "suppression and continuous cooling": the gas or aerosol first breaks the chain to extinguish the open flame, and then the heat is continuously taken away by means of fine water mist, spray, etc. The water volume and water supply duration are designed on the order of hours, instead of being counted according to the immersion time of traditional gas fire extinguishing.

In addition, most of the battery rooms in the data center are in the building and share the wall with the IT room. The strategy of "letting it burn out and only protecting the periphery" for container energy storage cannot be used, which is also changing the role and threshold of energy storage and fire fighting enterprises. For the energy storage fire protection industry, the focus of the competition is not the fire extinguishing agent parameter table, but before the open fire, after the re-ignition.