COMMENT
Still trying to catch
your breath from 2025? Just wait till this year
2026 for data centres means acceleration, innovation, and transformation
By Stuart Crump, global commercial director at LiquidStack
D
o you feel like the last year has fl own by, while at the same time, a decade’s worth of innovation and growth has somehow been compressed into 12 months. Yes? So, you obviously work in the data centre industry too.
Last December, it might have felt like the last few years of breakneck growth were transitioning into something slightly more sedate. Instead, things just seem to have accelerated. More mega investment plans announced, faster GPUs unveiled, more government interest in the sector. Any respite over Christmas will be brief, not least as data centre operators and customers weigh up how their infrastructure has coped with the holiday shopping period. So, what can you expect this year?
The numbers don’t lie: Growth accelerates Into 2026
The pace of development will be just as rapid. Earlier this year CBRE said vacancy rates continued to fall, while ever persistent power constraints were not enough to hold back growth. Instead, hyperscalers and
6
cloud operators would look for alternative locations.
Around the same time, Knight Frank forecast that global live IT capacity for 2025 would hit 55,646 MW, up 22 per cent on the previous year. Next year, things will cruise another 20 per cent higher to 66,504 MW. Yes, that’s a slight tempering of the headline growth rate. But it masks spectacular growth in some key markets. The Middle East data centre sector in particular is set to show almost 50 per cent growth next year.
And that was also before the
announcement of another wave of massive investments. Meta, in July, unveiled its plans for a string of next generation data centres dubbed Titan. Are they going to be big? Well, Mark Zuckerberg illustrated how the fl oorplan of one of these monster facilities would cover most of Manhattan.
Is this likely to be mirrored by other mega vendors? Google is raising over $3bn from a bond sale to fi nance further AI expansion, following a $6.75bn sale earlier this year. So, it doesn’t look like the big tech giants will be
DECEMBER/JANUARY 2026 | ELECTRONICS FOR ENGINEERS
closing their wallets and taking off their high- vis vests anytime soon.
But it’s one thing to build a data centre the size of Manhattan. It’s another to build multiple data centres that can service said city.
AI is undoubtedly driving growth, but as models and applications get to work on real world problems, latency and throughput will become more important, so you can expect more data centre activity at the edge.
Welcome to the spotlight Whether greenfi eld or brownfi eld, this all means data centres will be ever more visible, and not just literally. It’s inevitable that our industry is going to attract more scrutiny and political attention.
This will come from multiple angles. National and local governments are desperate to tempt data centre operations onto their turf, for the jobs and investment they bring and support downstream. They are also conscious of the need to establish some degree of data and AI sovereignty. At the same time, governments have to
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42
