Amid the politics and the build out boom driven by AI, data center operators continue to gather sustainability data — but rarely publicize it.
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.
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.
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.
NERC's draft computational load standards could redefine data centers as active grid participants, requiring new modeling, data reporting, operational coordination and disturbance reporting in a bid to protect grid stability.
This report reviews the key deployment considerations to ensure that risks associated with Li-ion battery energy storage in UPS systems are understood and mitigated appropriately.
Data center waste heat does not significantly raise local temperatures, but concerns over the heat island effect demand a robust response that addresses monitoring and mitigation measures.
The US state of Virginia has retained its sales-and-use-tax exemptions for data centers but is imposing a new tax on electricity use: a move that highlights the trade-offs, uncertainties and potential spread of industry-specific taxation.
Access to the latest hardware and rapid speed of deployment make public cloud attractive; yet today most training workloads run on-premises.
For years, the industry has celebrated a reassuring trend: despite a growing number of outages, resiliency has continued to improve. But as AI-driven expansion accelerates, that long-running improvement may be about to stall: or even reverse.
Andy Lawrence
Peter Judge
Jacqueline Davis
Dr. Rand Talib
Max Smolaks
Daniel Bizo
Dr. Owen Rogers
John O'Brien
Rose Weinschenk
Jay Dietrich
Douglas Donnellan