“DCN is increasingly treated as an end-to-end operating model that standardizes connectivity, security policy enforcement, and telemetry across users, the middle mile, and cloud/application edges,” Sanchez said. Dell’Oro defines DCN as platforms and services that deliver consistent connectivity, policy enforcement, and telemetry from users, across the WAN, to distributed cloud and application edges spanning branch sites, data centers and public clouds. The category is gaining relevance as hybrid architectures and AI-era traffic patterns increase the operational penalty for fragmented control planes. DCN buyers are moving beyond isolated upgrades and are prioritizing architectures that reduce operational seams across connectivity, security and telemetry so that incident response and change control can follow a single thread, according to Dell’Oro’s research. What makes DCN distinct is that it links user-to-application experience with where policy and visibility are enforced. This matters as application delivery paths become more dynamic and workloads shift between on-premises data centers, public cloud, and edge locations. The architectural requirement is eliminating handoffs between networking and security teams rather than optimizing individual network segments. Where DCN is growing the fastest Cloud/application edge is the fastest-growing DCN pillar. This segment deploys policy enforcement and telemetry collection points adjacent to workloads rather than backhauling traffic to centralized security stacks. “Multi-cloud remains a reality, but it is no longer the durable driver by itself,” Sanchez said. “Cloud/application edge is accelerating because enterprises are trying to make application paths predictable and secure across hybrid environments, and that requires pushing application-aware steering, policy enforcement, and unified telemetry closer to workloads.”

Edged US is targeting a narrow but increasingly valuable lane of the hyperscale AI infrastructure market: high-density compute delivered at speed, paired with a sustainability posture centered on waterless, closed-loop cooling and a portfolio-wide design PUE target of roughly 1.15. Two recent announcements illustrate the model. In Aurora, Illinois, Edged is developing a 72-MW facility purpose-built for AI training and inference, with liquid-to-chip cooling designed to support rack densities exceeding 200 kW. In Irving, Texas, a 24-MW campus expansion combines air-cooled densities above 120 kW per rack with liquid-to-chip capability reaching 400 kW. Taken together, the projects point to a consistent strategy: standardized, multi-building campuses in major markets; a vertically integrated technical stack with cooling at its core; and an operating model built around repeatable designs, modular systems, and readiness for rapidly escalating AI densities. A Campus-First Platform Strategy Edged US’s platform strategy is built around campus-scale expansion rather than one-off facilities. The company positions itself as a gigawatt-scale, AI-ready portfolio expanding across major U.S. metros through repeatable design targets and multi-building campuses: an emphasis that is deliberate and increasingly consequential. In Chicago/Aurora, Edged is developing a multi-building campus with an initial facility already online and a second 72-MW building under construction. Dallas/Irving follows the same playbook: the first facility opened in January 2025, with a second 24-MW building approved unanimously by the city. Taken together with developments in Atlanta, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Des Moines, Kansas City, and Phoenix, the footprint reflects a portfolio-first mindset rather than a collection of bespoke sites. This focus on campus-based expansion matters because the AI factory era increasingly rewards developers that can execute three things at once: Lock down power and land at scale. Standardize delivery across markets. Operate efficiently while staying aligned with community and regulatory expectations. Edged is explicitly selling the second

The U.S. data center market is entering 2026 with fundamentals that remain unmatched across commercial real estate, but the nature of the dominant constraint has shifted. Demand is no longer gated by capital, connectivity, or even land. It is gated by the ability to deliver very large blocks of power, on aggressive timelines, at a predictable cost. According to the CBRE 2026 U.S. Real Estate Market Outlook as overseen by Gordon Dolven and Pat Lynch, the sector is on track to post another record year for leasing activity, even as vacancy remains at historic lows and pricing reaches all-time highs. What has changed is the scale at which demand now presents itself, and the difficulty of meeting it. Large-Block Leasing Rewrites the Economics AI-driven workloads are reshaping leasing dynamics in ways that break from prior hyperscale norms. Where 10-MW-plus deployments once commanded pricing concessions, CBRE now observes the opposite behavior: large, contiguous blocks of capacity are commanding premiums. Neocloud providers, GPU-as-a-service platforms and AI startups, many backed by aggressive capital deployment strategies, are actively competing for full-building and campus-scale capacity.  For operators, this is altering development and merchandising strategies. Rather than subdividing shells for flexibility, owners increasingly face a strategic choice: hold buildings intact to preserve optionality for single-tenant, high-density users who are willing to pay for scale. In effect, scale itself has become the scarce asset. Behind-the-Meter Power Moves to the Foreground For data centers, power availability meaning not just access, but certainty of delivery, is now the defining variable in the market.  CBRE notes accelerating adoption of behind-the-meter strategies as operators seek to bypass increasingly constrained utility timelines. On-site generation using natural gas, solar, wind, and battery storage is gaining traction, particularly in deregulated electricity markets where operators have more latitude to structure BYOP (bring your own power) solutions. 

“It’s ideal for remote, sparse, or sensitive regions,” said Manish Rawat, analyst at TechInsights. “Key use cases include cloud-to-cloud links, data center replication, government, defense, and disaster recovery workloads. It supports rapid or temporary deployments and prioritizes fewer customers with high capacity, strict SLAs, and deep carrier integration.” Adoption, however, is expected to largely depend on the sector. For governments and organizations operating highly critical or sensitive infrastructure, where reliability and security outweigh cost considerations, this could be attractive as a redundancy option. “Banks, national security agencies, and other mission-critical operators may consider it as an alternate routing path,” Jain said. “For most enterprises, however, it is unlikely to replace terrestrial connectivity and would instead function as a supplementary layer.” Real-world performance Although satellite connectivity offers potential advantages, analysts note that questions remain around real-world performance. “TeraWave’s 6 Tbps refers to total constellation capacity, not per-user throughput, achieved via multiple optical inter-satellite links and ground gateways,” Rawat said. “Optical crosslinks provide high aggregate bandwidth but not a single terabit-class pipe. Performance lies between fiber and GEO satellites, with lower intercontinental latency than GEO but higher than fiber.” Operational factors could also affect network stability. Jitter is generally low, but handovers, rerouting, and weather conditions can introduce intermittent performance spikes. Packet loss is expected to remain modest but episodic, Rawat added.

In the second half of 2025, CyrusOne was racing to secure buildable power and faster time-to-market capacity for AI-era customers. At the same time, its reputation for mission-critical reliability took a very public hit when a disruption at a CyrusOne facility helped knock CME trading offline. The incident forced the company into an unusually open conversation about redundancy, cooling systems, and operational discipline: systems that are meant to disappear in normal operation, and dominate the story when they malfunction. From Projects to a Playbook Which projects, missteps, and strategic moves from 2025 are now shaping how CyrusOne enters 2026? Nowhere is that view clearer than in Texas. There, CyrusOne has been leaning hard into a “power + land + interconnect” model: treating deliverable power and grid position as part of the product, not just a prerequisite. If you map the company’s announcements since late July, Texas reveals the playbook. Secure power, secure substations and grid position, then build multi-phase campuses designed to scale quickly as demand materializes. The Calpine “Powered Land” Deal: From 190 MW to 400 MW in Three Months On July 30, 2025, CyrusOne and Calpine announced a 190-MW agreement tied to a hyperscale campus (DFW10) adjacent to Calpine’s Thad Hill Energy Center in Bosque County, Texas. The structure bundled power, grid connection, and land into a single development package, with CyrusOne saying the site was already under construction and targeting operation by Q4 2026. Just three months later, on November 3–4, the partners announced a second phase, adding 210 MW and taking the campus to 400 MW. The update emphasized coordination to support grid reliability during scarcity; such curtailment and operational-coordination concepts are becoming table stakes for ERCOT-scale megaprojects. Together, the two announcements show CyrusOne placing a large bet on an emerging model: power-ready campuses, or “powered

If IT groups are to be the strategic business partners their companies need, they require solutions that can improve infrastructure life cycle management in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and heightened security threats. To quantify the value of such solutions, Cisco recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ analysis of Cisco Intersight. The comprehensive study found that for a composite organization, Intersight delivered 192% return on investment (ROI) and a payback period of less than six months, along with significant tangible benefits to IT and businesses. Cisco Intersight overview Cisco Intersight is a cloud-native IT operations platform for infrastructure life cycle management. It provides IT teams with comprehensive visibility, control, and automation capabilities for Cisco’s portfolio of compute solutions for data centers, colocation facilities, and edge environments based on the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS). Intersight also integrates with leading operating systems, storage providers, hypervisors, and third-party IT service management and security tools. Intersight’s unified, policy-driven approach to infrastructure management helps IT groups automate numerous tasks and, as Forrester found, free up time to dedicate to strategic projects. Forrester study quantifies the benefits of Cisco Intersight  A composite organization using Cisco Intersight achieved:192% ROI and payback in less than six months$3.3M net present value over three years$2.7M from improved uptime and resilience 50% reduction in mean time to resolution $1.7M from increased IT productivity$267K benefit from decreased time to value due to faster project execution and earlier return on infrastructure investments Forrester Total Economic Impact study findings The analyst firm conducted detailed interviews with IT decision-makers and Intersight users at six organizations, from which it created one composite organization: a multinational technology-driven company with $10 billion in annual revenue, 120 branch locations, and a team of six engineers managing its 1,000 servers deployed in several