Miranda Gardiner, iMasons Climate Accord:  Since 2023, the digital infrastructure industry has moved definitively from planning to execution in the AI infrastructure cycle. Industry analysts forecast continued exponential growth, with active capacity at least doubling between now and 2030 and total capacity potentially tripling, quintupling, or more. In practical terms, we’ll see more digital infrastructure capacity come online in the next five year than has been built in the past 30 years, representing a historic industrial transformation requiring trillions of dollars in capital expenditure and a workforce measured in the millions. Design and organizational flexibility, integrated execution of sustainable solutions, and community-centered workforce development will separate those that thrive from those that struggle. Effective organizations will pivot quickly under these constantly shifting conditions and the leaders will be those that build fast but build right, as strategic flexibility balances long-term performance, efficiency, and regulatory compliance. We already know the resource intensity required to bring AI resources online and are working diligently to ensure this short-term, delivering streamlined and optimized solutions for everything from site selection to cooling and power management while lower lifecycle emissions. Additionally, in some regions, grid interconnection timelines and power availability are already the pacing item for data center development. Organizations that align their sustainability targets and energy procurement strategies will have a clearer path to execution. An operational model capable of delivering multiple large-scale facilities simultaneously across regions is another key piece to successful outcomes. Standardized, repeatable frameworks that reduce engineering time and accelerate permitting. We hear often about collaboration and strong partnerships, and these will be critical with utilities, regulators, and equipment manufacturers to anticipate bottlenecks before they impact schedules. Execution discipline will increasingly determine competitive advantage as the industry scales. The world and, especially, our host communities, are watching closely. Projects that move forward

SAN JOSE, Calif. — If there was a single message that emerged from Jensen Huang’s keynote at Nvidia’s GTC conference this week, it was this: the artificial intelligence revolution is entering its infrastructure phase. For the past several years, the technology industry has been preoccupied with training ever larger models. But in Huang’s telling, that era is already giving way to something far bigger: the industrial-scale deployment of AI systems that run continuously, generating intelligence on demand. “The inference inflection point has arrived,” Huang told the audience gathered at the SAP Center. That shift carries enormous implications for the data center industry. Instead of episodic bursts of compute used to train models, the next generation of AI systems will require persistent, high-throughput infrastructure designed to serve billions, and eventually trillions, of inference requests every day. And the scale of the buildout Huang envisions is staggering. Throughout the keynote, the Nvidia CEO repeatedly referenced what he believes will become a trillion-dollar global market for AI infrastructure in the coming years, spanning accelerated computing systems, networking fabrics, storage architectures, power systems, and the facilities required to house them. At that scale, Huang argued, data centers are no longer simply IT facilities. They are truly becoming AI factories: industrial systems designed to convert electricity into tokens. “Tokens are the new commodity,” Huang said. “AI factories are the infrastructure that produces them.” Across more than two hours on stage, Huang sketched the architecture of that new computing platform, introducing new computing systems, networking technologies, software frameworks, and infrastructure blueprints designed to support what Nvidia believes will be the largest computing buildout in history. Four main themes defined the presentation: • The arrival of the inference inflection point.• The emergence of OpenClaw as a foundational operating layer for AI agents.• New hybrid inference architectures involving

Christopher Gorthy, DPR Construction:  Early collaboration of key stakeholders has become the baseline to deliver these complex projects. The teams that are successful in these environments are the ones who combine effective meeting structures with enough in‑person interaction to build real trust. Pairing those relationships with the right tools can help track key decision making, document reasoning, and keep everyone aligned on “The Why,” creating more predictable outcomes. Where the industry continues to feel fragmented is around liability, risk, and comfort with sharing design and model data. Achieving the speed these projects demand requires the entire team to understand each partner’s constraints and then working together to solve problems, communicating clearly and documenting decisions as they go. All of our partnerships are solving equations with multiple variables. Our teams must provide early feedback and solutions when faced with impacts or delays outside our control, and even earlier communications of impacts that cannot be mitigated. Open communication channels, whether through shared digital platforms or recurring working sessions, are critical to staying ahead of risk. As projects get bigger, alignment with financial institutions, insurance entities and private equity partners also have become essential.   The number of trade partners capable of taking on contracts of this size is limited, so making sure we are setting up our partners for success while also working to expand the network of qualified trade partners is a key strategy.  From a tactical standpoint, the most effective projects operate from a single integrated schedule that ties together the owner, vendors, general contractor, trades, commissioning teams, and all other stakeholders. Reinforcing this with consistent two‑ to three‑week look‑ahead reviews and onsite schedule coordination meetings regardless of contractual structure significantly increases alignment and efficiency at the project level.

The Data Center as Token Factory If there was one line of thinking that defined the session, it was Huang’s insistence that the industry must stop thinking about computers as systems for data entry and retrieval. That, he said, is the old paradigm. The new one is a “token manufacturing system.” That phrase landed because it compresses a lot of Nvidia’s strategy into a single mental model. In this view, the modern data center is no longer just a warehouse of servers or a cloud abstraction layer. It is a factory, and the unit of output is increasingly the token. For Data Center Frontier readers, this is a familiar direction of travel, but Huang pushed it further than most CEOs do. He repeatedly tied Nvidia’s roadmap to token throughput, token economics, and performance per watt. He is clearly trying to establish a new baseline metric for AI infrastructure value. Not raw capacity, but how much useful intelligence a facility can produce from a fixed power envelope. That point also surfaced in his discussion of Grace and Vera CPUs. Huang’s argument was not that Nvidia intends to win every classical CPU market. It was that traditional measures such as cores per dollar are insufficient in AI data centers where the real economic risk is leaving extremely valuable GPUs idle. In other words, the CPU matters because it must move work fast enough to keep the GPU estate productive. In a power-limited, AI-heavy environment, the purpose of the CPU changes. It is no longer optimized for the old hyperscale rental model. It is optimized for keeping the token factory fed. That is a subtle but major shift. It suggests that the next-generation AI data center will be increasingly engineered around the productivity of the overall system rather than around legacy component economics.

The defining feature of our current data center cycle isn’t a shortage of customers or capital; it’s a shortage of power that can actually be delivered on time. In the space of three years, large‑load interconnection queues have gone from a planning tool to the main reason otherwise viable AI campuses are missing their deployment windows. Multi‑year delays for large loads are quickly becoming the norm, not the exception, in major markets, turning what should be a sprint to deploy AI into a long and uncertain wait. At the grid level, the same pattern is visible in the queues. Across U.S. markets, that queuing infrastructure is now a primary source of delay. Regional operators from PJM to ERCOT and NYISO report steep increases in both the number and size of large‑load requests, with data centers and other energy‑intensive digital infrastructure accounting for a growing share of new demand ( https://insidelines.pjm.com/pjm-board-outlines-plans-to-integrate-large-loads-reliably/,  https://www.nyiso.com/-/energy-intensive-projects-in-nyiso-s-interconnection-queue/,  https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/ercots-large-load-queue-has-nearly-quadrupled-in-a-single-year/). In practice, that means more projects are being told that meaningful capacity will not be available on the timeline their customers expect, forcing them into redesigns, phased power ramps, or alternative power strategies. Time, in other words, has become the scarcest resource in the data center economy. The same 60 MW AI facility that looks attractive at a 17.1% IRR when delivered on schedule can see its returns fall to 12.6% with a three‑month delay and to 8.8% with a six‑month delay—nearly halving its investment case ( https://www.thefastmode.com/expert-opinion/47210-what-we-learned-in-2025-about-data-center-builds-why-delays-will-persist-in-2026-without-greater-visibility). That is why, in this industrial revolution, the metric that matters most is speed‑to‑power: how quickly real, reliable megawatts can be made available at the fence line, not how many gigawatts exist on slides or in press releases. In this industrial revolution, that metric will do more to determine who wins than any short‑term race to buy chips or secure logos.

For the third installment of our Executive Roundtable for the First Quarter of 2026, Data Center Frontier examines a question at the heart of AI infrastructure strategy: How to design for a demand curve that refuses to sit still. The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence workloads has introduced a new kind of uncertainty into data center development. Training clusters continue to scale, inference workloads are proliferating, and enterprise adoption is accelerating in ways that challenge even the most aggressive forecasts. Yet beneath that growth lies a fundamental ambiguity. Not just how much capacity will be needed, but when, where, and in what form. For developers and operators, this creates a tension between speed and flexibility. The pressure to deliver capacity quickly has never been greater, as hyperscale and neocloud players race to secure power and bring AI infrastructure online. At the same time, the risk of overbuilding (or locking into infrastructure that may not align with future workloads, densities, or architectures) has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in power and electrical design. Decisions around substation sizing, transmission commitments, switchgear capacity, and on-site generation are being made years in advance of fully understood demand profiles. These choices carry long-term consequences, shaping not only capital efficiency but the ability to adapt as AI technologies and use cases continue to evolve. The result is a shift in design philosophy. Increasingly, the industry is moving away from static, one-time provisioning toward architectures that prioritize modularity, scalability, and optionality, seeking to preserve flexibility without sacrificing near-term delivery. In this roundtable, our panel explores how developers, operators, and suppliers are navigating that balance, and what it will take to future-proof AI infrastructure in an era defined by both unprecedented growth and persistent uncertainty.