The past year warrants a revision of generative AI power estimates, as GPU shipments have skyrocketed, despite some offsetting factors. However, uncertainty remains high, with no clarity on the viability of these spending levels.
As AI workloads surge, managing cloud costs is becoming more vital than ever, requiring organizations to balance scalability with cost control. This is crucial to prevent runaway spend and ensure AI projects remain viable and profitable.
We hosted an exclusive briefing on the Uptime Institute Network — the global community of data center leaders dedicated to improving operational resilience, efficiency, and strategic planning.
The trend towards regulating and controlling data center energy use, efficiency and sustainability continues to grow globally, with the appearance of utility rate management regulations and the propagation policies influenced by the EU’s EED.
This briefing report identifies and describes several de facto standards and laws used in the field of data center sustainability and efficiency (for convenience, we use the term “standards” for all).
Tensions between team members of different ranks or departments can inhibit effective communication in a data center, putting uptime at risk. This can be avoided by adopting proven communication protocols from other mission-critical industries.
Uptime Institute believes that data center operators should optimize facility-level sustainability performance before addressing ecosystem issues. A clear definition of data center sustainability is needed to enable this approach.
The US government’s AI compute diffusion rules, introduced in January 2025, will be rescinded — with new rules coming. It warns any dealings linked to advanced Chinese chips will require US export authorization. Operators still face tough demands.
Data center owners are as committed to Tier III and Tier IV designs as ever, but more will be required to share power, adding complexity and possibly risk.
Organizations that architect resiliency into their cloud applications should expect a sharp rise in carbon emissions and costs. Some architectures provide a better compromise on cost, carbon and availability than others.
Preventing outages continues to be a central focus for data center owners and operators. While infrastructure design and resiliency frameworks have improved in many cases, the complexity of modern architectures continues to present new risks that…
IT operators lack a credible work-per-energy metric to report overall IT and facilities system efficiency. Developments in reporting IT equipment work capacities enable the industry to begin experimenting with this metric.
In the US, the politicization of data center development is underway, driven by its impact on power prices. As state governments seek ways to protect consumers, operators will need to engage in the policy debate.
The prevention of outages has always been a top priority for data center owners and operators — but outages do occur. This report analyzes recent Uptime Institute data on IT and data center outages: their causes, costs and consequences.
Many operators expect GPUs to be highly utilized, but examples of real-world deployments paint a different picture. Why are expensive compute resources being wasted — and what effect does this have on data center power consumption?
Daniel Bizo
Owen Rogers
Matt Stansberry
Scott Killian
Jay Dietrich
Seb Shehadi
Rose Weinschenk
Andy Lawrence
Douglas Donnellan
Chris Brown
Peter Judge
Max Smolaks