Latin America. Data center innovation continues to be shaped by macro forces and AI-related technology trends, according to a report by Vertiv Frontiers.
The report draws on experience from across the organization, detailing the technology trends driving current and future innovation, from AI empowerment to digital twins and adaptive liquid cooling.
"The data center industry continues to evolve rapidly in how it designs, builds, operates, and services these facilities, responding to the demands for density and speed of deployment of AI factories," said Scott Armul, chief product and technology officer at Vertiv. "We observe crossover technological forces, including extreme densification, driving transformative trends such as high-voltage direct current (DC) power architectures and advanced liquid cooling, essential to achieving the gigawatt scaling critical for AI innovation. On-site power generation and digital twin technology will also contribute to accelerating the adoption of AI."
The Vertiv Frontiers report builds on and expands on previous annual Vertiv Data Center Trends predictions. The report identifies the macro forces driving innovation in data centers: extreme densification—accelerated by AI and HPC workloads; scaling in power (gigawatts) and faster — data centers are now deployed quickly and at an unprecedented scale; data center as a computing unit—the age of AI requires facilities to be built and operated as a single system; and silicon diversification—data center infrastructure must accommodate a growing range of chips and computing capacity.
The report details how these macro forces have shaped five key trends that impact specific areas of the data center landscape:
1. AI readiness
Most data centers today still rely on hybrid AC/DC power distribution from the network to IT racks, which includes three to four stages of conversion and some inefficiencies. This existing approach is under pressure as power densities increase, driven in large part by AI workloads. The shift to high-voltage DC architectures allows for significant reductions in current, conductor size, and the number of conversion stages, while centralizing power conversion at the cleanroom level. Hybrid AC and DC systems are widespread, but as standards and full DC equipment mature, high-voltage DC is likely to become more prevalent as rack densities increase. On-site generation and microgrids will also drive the adoption of high-voltage DC.
2. Distributed AI
The billions of dollars invested in AI data centers to support large language models (LLMs) to date have been aimed at supporting the widespread adoption of AI tools by consumers and businesses. Vertiv believes that AI is becoming increasingly critical for businesses, but how and from where those inference services are delivered will depend on the organization's specific requirements and conditions. While this will affect businesses of all types, highly regulated industries, such as finance, defense, and healthcare, may need to maintain private or hybrid AI environments across on-premises data centers, due to data storage and protection, security, or latency requirements. Flexible, scalable, high-density, liquid-cooled power systems could enable capacity through new construction or modernization of existing facilities.
3. Energy autonomy accelerates
Short-term, on-site power generation capacity has been essential for most independent data centers for decades, to support resilience. However, widespread power availability challenges are creating conditions to adopt extended energy autonomy, especially for AI data centers. Investment in on-site power generation, through natural gas turbines and other technologies, has several intrinsic benefits but is primarily driven by power availability challenges. Technology strategies such as Bring Your Own Power (and Cooling) are likely to be part of ongoing energy autonomy plans.
4. Design and operations powered by digital twins
With increasingly dense AI workloads and more powerful GPUs also comes a demand to deploy these complex AI factories quickly. Using AI-based tools, data centers can be mapped and specified virtually, through digital twins, and IT and critical digital infrastructure can be integrated, often as prefabricated modular designs, and deployed as compute units, reducing time per token by up to 50%. This approach will be important to efficiently achieve the gigawatt-scale expansions required for future advances in AI.
5. Adaptive and resilient liquid cooling
AI workloads and infrastructure have accelerated the adoption of liquid cooling. But conversely, AI can also be used to further refine and optimize liquid cooling solutions. Liquid cooling has become critical for a growing number of operators, but AI could provide ways to further enhance their capabilities. AI, along with additional monitoring and control systems, has the potential to make liquid cooling systems smarter and even more robust by predicting potential failures and effectively managing fluids and components. This trend should lead to increased reliability and uptime for high-value hardware and associated data/workloads.
Vertiv operates in more than 130 countries, delivering critical digital infrastructure solutions to data centers, communication networks, and commercial and industrial facilities worldwide. The company's extensive portfolio spans power management, thermal management, and IT infrastructure solutions and services, from the cloud to the network edge. This integrated approach enables continuous operations, optimal performance, and scalable growth for customers navigating an increasingly complex digital landscape.
