
By early 2026 data‑center cooling has shifted from a simple air‑vs‑liquid debate to a full‑stack engineering challenge. Breakthroughs such as HRL Laboratories’ Low‑Chill single‑phase liquid cooling promise 40% more heat removal or a ten‑fold reduction in pumping power, while Johnson Controls’ acquisition of Alloy Enterprises underscores the strategic value of cooling IP. Major OEMs like Carrier and Modine are emphasizing resilient chiller designs that survive extreme ambient swings, and manufacturers such as Boyd are doubling production capacity to meet AI‑driven demand. Together, these moves signal that cooling now dictates AI deployment feasibility, cost, and site selection.

Enterprise cloud infrastructure spending surged to $119.1 billion in Q4, a 30% year‑over‑year increase and the fastest growth in three years, driven largely by generative AI workloads. The top three hyperscalers—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—still dominate, but AI‑focused providers such as CoreWeave...

CoreWeave launched ARENA, a production‑scale AI lab that lets customers run full AI workloads on GPU clusters mirroring live environments, delivering realistic performance, scaling and cost validation before deployment. The platform bridges the gap where sandbox tests misrepresent production behavior...

Rich Miller, founder of Data Center Frontier, warns that 2026 will be the execution year for AI‑driven data‑center projects, separating viable builds from hype. Power availability, especially grid constraints, emerges as the primary gating factor, pushing developers toward on‑site generation....

Vertiv reported a record Q4 2025, with net sales rising 23% to $2.88 billion and organic growth of 19%. Orders exploded 252% year‑over‑year, pushing the backlog to $15 billion and a 2.9× book‑to‑bill ratio. The company unveiled high‑density prefabricated cooling platforms, modular...

Meta announced a $10 billion, near‑gigawatt data‑center campus in Lebanon, Indiana, marking one of the largest U.S. AI infrastructure projects. At the same time, European AI‑infrastructure specialist Nebius unveiled a 240 MW campus in Béthune, France, repurposing a former industrial site. Both...

Hitachi Vantara’s State of Data Infrastructure Global Report 2025 finds that infrastructure maturity, not sheer scale, is the primary barrier to reliable AI workloads. Surveying 1,200 large‑enterprise IT leaders, the study classifies firms into Emerging, Defined and Optimized, with only...

The data‑center industry is moving from a defensive NIMBY stance to a proactive YIMBY strategy, driven by tools like the Digital Infrastructure Framework that give local governments clear evaluation language and negotiation leverage. Communities such as Loudoun County now see...