What's Hot in AI Infra Now: Power and Cooling
AIwire, Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026
The recent AI Infra Summit had a lot of great presentations on innovations happening at the chip, memory, system, network, and storage levels. But there’s also quite a bit happening further down the five-layer cake, in the underlying power and cooling that’s needed to make the racks of AI infrastructure work.
Alex Cordovil, the research director at the Dell’Oro Group, presented a lot of good information during his 2026 AI Infra Summit session titled “The Market Outlook – What the Last 12 Months Tells Us About the Next 24.”
Breakthroughs in AI have led to a mad dash to build massive data centers all over the world. Just five years ago, adding 5GW of data center capacity per year was considered bold. Now Dell’Oro Group is projecting 60GW per year of new data center capacity by 2030, which is near the top of projections of other industry analysts, including Bain, McKinsey, JP Morgan, and BCG.
There are headwinds to the buildout, including the rising cost of borrowing as well as community backlash against data centers, Cordovil said. While many data center projects are projected to go off the rails, the overall trend appears to be accelerating growth.