Backdrop: Thousands of industry leaders will head to Washington, D.C., April 20-23 to attend Data Center World 2026.
The message underlying the keynotes and conference tracks: “The AI revolution has ignited the fastest infrastructure expansion in human history.”
How fast is it? Imagine rebuilding the interstate highway system with additional lanes each way and fast EV charging stations every 50 miles — and doing so in years rather than decades.
Industry players have earmarked approximately $3 trillion over the next five years to build and expand data centers.
Today, there are around 11,800 data centers. By 2030, that number will reach 15,000.
Massive scale: What’s remarkable is not just the number of new data centers but the massive scale at which they operate.
Yesterday’s megawatt data centers are now measured in gigawatts. Softbank Group recently announced plans to build an AI data center in Ohio capable of drawing 10 gigawatts of power — the peak demand of some entire countries.
New thinking required: The historic speed and scale have prompted leaders gathering for Data Center World to think differently.
For instance, some builders and operators are constructing facilities out of wood rather than steel and concrete. In other cases, they’re locating data centers under weatherproof tents or in repurposed newspaper printing plants. And for cooling, one consortium has even submerged a sealed server cluster off the coast of Shanghai.
New yardsticks: Conference attendees face a world in which innovation keeps pushing the 10x button. As a result, metrics that once made sense at “normal” scale no longer apply.
Conventional 10-kilowatt (kW) server racks have given way to 100-150 kW, as powerful AI chips devour more and more electricity. Power density is expected to reach 600kW per rack in a couple of years and 1 megawatt by the end of the decade.
Network speeds are also accelerating into new territory. Traditionally gauged in gigabits per second, throughput is now measured in terabits per second to support AI workloads.
With billions of dollars invested, data center owners and operators are considering new yardsticks such as tokens per watt to track performance and ROI.
New lens on storage: AI learns from data, generates data and refines itself with data. That’s why organizations are storing more data for longer, setting off exponential growth in capacity demand.
Some data centers store an exabyte (1 million terabytes) or more of data. At this scale, cost per exabyte becomes a useful metric. Managing that cost entails deploying the most advanced, highest-capacity hard drives.
This approach minimizes the number of hard drives it takes to store each exabyte, saving on space and energy use at scale.
Across thousands and thousands of storage racks in gigantic data centers, these efficiencies translate into sustainable economic advantages.
Bottom line: Data Center World 2026 will offer insights into keeping pace with this unprecedented buildout — and extracting more value from every watt, every square foot and every component in the infrastructure stack.
Learn how efficient storage unlocks data value at scale.
