US federal- and state-level ratepayer protection bills and initiatives signal a shift in how data centers interact with the public grid. As policymakers revise grid rules for resource-hungry projects, there is growing debate over how to split costs.
New York's data center moratorium is more than a pause on new projects, it is an attempt to make developers partners in rebuilding the grid — and could provide a model for other governments.
Results from Uptime Institute's 2026 Cooling Systems Survey (n=1,034) focus on the usage of data center cooling systems across the industry, zeroing in on the continued adoption of direct liquid cooling.The attached data files below provide full…
Amid the politics and the build out boom driven by AI, data center operators continue to gather sustainability data — but rarely publicize it.
This report highlights results from vendor and product supplier respondents to the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2026 and provides an insight into the spending strategies, technology adoption and other issues facing their customers.
Drones can be used to surveil or potentially attack data centers, but operators have limited options to respond. Aviation and airspace regulations restrict intervention, even when drones are flying over a facility.
The industry-average PUE decreases slowly, with efficient new data centers offset by legacy facilities. Weighting the average by IT capacity instead reveals a faster pace of efficiency gains from larger new builds.
Heat waves and winter storms test the operational side of data centers. The question is no longer whether systems were designed for extreme weather, but whether operators understand how much headroom is needed to withstand it in practice.
Rules to protect the electricity grid from large swings in data center power demand are being drafted. But will they arrive before a major data center hub suffers a blackout?
The challenge of managing AI training-related power swings is still relatively new. Addressing these swings at their root cause — the IT hardware itself — can be both technically and economically effective.
On average, cloud provider outages affected application availability less in 2025 than in 2024. Yet risk remains: an unfortunate choice of zone or region can subject even well-planned applications to hours of disruption.
Uptime Institute's Annual Global Data Center Survey, now in its 16th year, is the most comprehensive and longest-running study of its kind. The findings in this report highlight the practices and experiences of data center owners and operators in…
AI-accelerated digital twins are central to many AI factory designs and builds. But despite progress in tackling specific power, cooling and IT challenges, most applications remain unproven beyond initial pilots and lack a clear return on investment.
Douglas Donnellan
Andy Lawrence
Daniel Bizo
Dr. Owen Rogers
Peter Judge
John O'Brien
Jacqueline Davis
Max Smolaks
Rose Weinschenk
The Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey, now in its 16th year, highlights the practices, perceptions, intentions and experiences of data center owners and operators across resiliency, sustainability, efficiency, staffing, cloud and AI.
As the data center industry incorporates new AI tools into operations, operators need to maintain strong human oversight to prevent downtime. AI tools cannot eliminate human error, but they may diminish skill development.
Paul Carton
Anthony Sbarra
Laurie Williams
Dr. Rand Talib
Chris Brown