Meta's decision to give away its latest large language model challenges the narrative around AI infrastructure.
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 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.
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.
A new framework from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) creates a classification system for data center demand response capabilities to help promote grid flexibility and, in turn, support the continued growth of digital infrastructure.
Internal efforts to maximize token use, combined with changes in LLM pricing structures, have rapidly increased enterprise AI spending. Yet there is often limited visibility into whether such expenditures are creating value.
AI data centers are racing ahead, but the grid isn't keeping up: operators need to rethink how they connect to, generate and manage energy to unlock expansion without overwhelming already strained generation and transmission systems.
In AI model training, idle GPUs — not high prices — are the biggest driver of cost, with poor utilization quietly burning tens of thousands of dollars in wasted compute capacity.
Policymakers across the US are reassessing tax incentives for data center operators, reflecting shifting priorities around infrastructure, costs and community impacts.
Growing public opposition to data center development has pushed many data center companies to invest in media and promotional campaigns. But, as opposition intensifies, this type of outreach is unlikely to sway public opinion.
PUE measures facility energy overhead relative to IT load, but it does not show how much of a site's provisioned power envelope ultimately reaches IT. Power and compute effectiveness (PCE) introduces a metric that makes this allocation visible.
Uptime Intelligence analysis shows that minimum thresholds for IT power utilization misrepresents server work capacity utilization. These thresholds can unintentionally incentivize operators to disable server energy efficiency features.
Concerns over rising electricity costs and environmental impact are driving local opposition to new data center projects in the US, prompting a growing number of cancellations.
Growing workload demand continued to drive capacity growth in 2025 for both enterprise and colocation companies. Although colocation growth remained strong overall, more colocation operators reported reaching a plateau than in 2024.Fewer enterprise…
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Douglas Donnellan
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