Across many conversations at the start of this year, at PTC and other conferences alike, the word on everyone’s lips seems to be “community.” For the data center industry, that single word now captures a turning point from just a few short years ago: we are no longer a niche, back‑of‑house utility, but a front‑page presence in local politics, school board budgets, and town hall debates. That visibility is forcing a choice in how we tell our story—either accept a permanent NIMBY-reactive framework, or actively build a YIMBY narrative that portrays the real value digital infrastructure brings to the markets and surrounding communities that host it. Speaking regularly with Ilissa Miller, CEO of iMiller Public Relations about this topic, there is work to be done across the ecosystem to build communications. Miller recently reflected: “What we’re seeing in communities isn’t a rejection of digital infrastructure, it’s a rejection of uncertainty driven by anxiety and fear. Most local leaders have never been given a framework to evaluate digital infrastructure developments the way they evaluate roads, water systems, or industrial parks. When there’s no shared planning language, ‘no’ becomes the safest answer.” A Brief History of “No” Community pushback against data centers is no longer episodic; it has become organized, media‑savvy, and politically influential in key markets. In Northern Virginia, resident groups and environmental organizations have mobilized against large‑scale campuses, pressing counties like Loudoun and Prince William to tighten zoning, question incentives, and delay or reshape projects.1 Loudoun County’s move in 2025 to end by‑right approvals for new facilities, requiring public hearings and board votes, marked a watershed moment as the world’s densest data center market signaled that communities now expect more say over where and how these campuses are built. Prince William County’s decision to sharply increase its tax rate on

Each January, the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference serves as a barometer for where digital infrastructure is headed next. And according to Nomad Futurist founders Nabeel Mahmood and Phillip Koblence, the message from PTC 2026 was unmistakable: The industry has moved beyond hype. The hard work has begun. In the latest episode of The DCF Show Podcast, part of our ongoing ‘Nomads at the Frontier’ series, Mahmood and Koblence joined Data Center Frontier to unpack the tone shift emerging across the AI and data center ecosystem. Attendance continues to grow year over year. Conversations remain energetic. But the character of those conversations has changed. As Mahmood put it: “The hype that the market started to see is actually resulting a bit more into actions now, and those conversations are resulting into some good progress.” The difference from prior years? Less speculation. More execution. From Data Center Cowboys to Real Deployments Koblence offered perhaps the sharpest contrast between PTC conversations in 2024 and those in 2026. Two years ago, many projects felt speculative. Today, developers are arriving with secured power, customers, and construction underway. “If 2024’s PTC was data center cowboys — sites that in someone’s mind could be a data center — this year was: show me the money, show me the power, give me accurate timelines.” In other words, the market is no longer rewarding hypothetical capacity. It is demanding delivered capacity. Operators now speak in terms of deployments already underway, not aspirational campuses still waiting on permits and power commitments. And behind nearly every conversation sits the same gating factor. Power. Power Has Become the Industry’s Defining Constraint Whether discussions centered on AI factories, investment capital, or campus expansion, Mahmood and Koblence noted that every conversation eventually returned to energy availability. “All of those questions are power,” Koblence said.

As AI infrastructure scales toward ever-higher rack densities and gigawatt-class campuses, cooling has moved from a technical subsystem to a defining strategic issue for the data center industry. A trio of announcements in early February highlights how rapidly the cooling and AI infrastructure stack is consolidating and evolving: Trane Technologies’ acquisition of LiquidStack; Submer’s acquisition of Radian Arc, extending its reach from core data centers into telco edge environments; and Submer’s partnership with Anant Raj to accelerate sovereign AI infrastructure deployment across India. Layered atop these developments is fresh guidance from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure explaining why closed-loop, direct-to-chip cooling is becoming central to next-generation facility design, particularly in regions where water use has become a flashpoint in community discussions around data center growth. Taken together, these developments show how the industry is moving beyond point solutions toward integrated, scalable AI infrastructure ecosystems, where cooling, compute, and deployment models must work together across hyperscale campuses and distributed edge environments alike. Trane Moves to Own the Cooling Stack The most consequential development comes from Trane Technologies, which on February 10 announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire LiquidStack, one of the pioneers and leading innovators in data center liquid cooling. The acquisition significantly strengthens Trane’s ambition to become a full-service thermal partner for data center operators, extending its reach from plant-level systems all the way down to the chip itself. LiquidStack, headquartered in Carrollton, Texas, built its reputation on immersion cooling and advanced direct-to-chip liquid solutions supporting high-density deployments across hyperscale, enterprise, colocation, edge, and blockchain environments. Under Trane, those technologies will now be scaled globally and integrated into a broader thermal portfolio. In practical terms, Trane is positioning itself to deliver cooling across the full thermal chain, including: • Central plant equipment and chillers.• Heat rejection and controls

The State of Data Infrastructure Global Report 2025 from Hitachi Vantara arrives at a moment when the data center industry is undergoing one of the most profound structural shifts in its history. The transition from enterprise IT to AI-first infrastructure has moved from aspiration to inevitability, forcing operators, developers, and investors to confront uncomfortable truths about readiness, resilience, and risk. Although framed around “AI readiness,” the report ultimately tells an infrastructure story: one that maps directly onto how data centers are designed, operated, secured, and justified economically. Drawing on a global survey of more than 1,200 IT leaders, the report introduces a proprietary maturity model that evaluates organizations across six dimensions: scalability, reliability, security, governance, sovereignty, and sustainability. Respondents are then grouped into three categories—Emerging, Defined, and Optimized—revealing a stark conclusion: most organizations are not constrained by access to AI models or capital, but by the fragility of the infrastructure supporting their data pipelines. For the data center industry, the implications are immediate, shaping everything from availability design and automation strategies to sustainability planning and evolving customer expectations. In short, extracting value from AI now depends less on experimentation and more on the strength and resilience of the underlying infrastructure. The Focus of the Survey: Infrastructure, Not Algorithms Although the report is positioned as a study of AI readiness, its primary focus is not models, training approaches, or application development, but rather the infrastructure foundations required to operate AI reliably at scale. Drawing on responses from more than 1,200 organizations, Hitachi Vantara evaluates how enterprises are positioned to support production AI workloads across six dimensions as stated above: scalability, reliability, security, governance, sovereignty, and sustainability. These factors closely reflect the operational realities shaping modern data center design and management. The survey’s central argument is that AI success is no longer

While Meta’s Indiana campus anchors hyperscale expansion in the United States, Europe recorded its own major infrastructure milestone this week as Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure provider Nebius unveiled plans for a 240-megawatt data center campus in Béthune, France, near Lille in the country’s northern industrial corridor. When completed, the campus will rank among Europe’s largest AI-focused data center facilities and positions northern France as a growing node in the continent’s expanding AI infrastructure map. The development repurposes a former Bridgestone tire manufacturing site, reflecting a broader trend across Europe in which legacy industrial properties, already equipped with heavy power access, transport links, and industrial zoning, are being converted into large-scale digital infrastructure hubs. Located within reach of connectivity and enterprise corridors linking Paris, Brussels, London, and Amsterdam, the site allows Nebius to serve major European markets while avoiding the congestion and power constraints increasingly shaping Tier 1 data center hubs. Industrial Infrastructure Becomes Digital Infrastructure Developers increasingly view former industrial sites as ideal for AI campuses because they often provide: • Existing grid interconnection capacity built for heavy industry• Transport and logistics infrastructure already in place• Industrial zoning that reduces permitting friction• Large contiguous parcels suited to phased campus expansion For regions like Hauts-de-France, redevelopment projects also offer economic transition opportunities, replacing legacy manufacturing capacity with next-generation digital infrastructure investment. Local officials have positioned the project as part of broader efforts to reposition northern France as a logistics and technology hub within Europe. The Neocloud Model Gains Ground Beyond the site itself, Nebius’ expansion illustrates the rapid emergence of neocloud infrastructure providers, companies building GPU-intensive AI capacity without operating full hyperscale cloud ecosystems. These firms increasingly occupy a strategic middle ground: supplying AI compute capacity to enterprises, startups, and even hyperscalers facing short-term infrastructure constraints. Nebius’ rise over the past year

Relationship with OpenAI While much of the initial query, and subsequent ones, have focused on licensing and bundling, the FTC is also looking into the company’s relationship with OpenAI, and raising questions about Microsoft’s data centers, capacity constraints, and AI spending and research. Notably, the tech giant’s initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI has grown into a multi-billion-dollar partnership, with Microsoft rolling out ChatGPT-powered features across its product line in 2023. The FTC is examining whether the relationship is an undisclosed merger that should have been subject to antitrust review. Further, the federal agency is scrutinizing Microsoft’s alleged decision to scale back its own AI research following the OpenAI investment, potentially reducing competition. Ultimately, all of this recalls the industry-shaping 1990s US federal investigation into Microsoft’s monopoly of desktop software and web browsers. A federal judge ruled at the time that the company deliberately built the Internet Explorer (IE) browser into Windows to edge out rivals like the now-defunct Netscape. And, analysts note, it’s an indication that Microsoft hasn’t learned from those past lessons. “While technology and trends may have evolved since Microsoft’s first anti-trust case in 1998, where they were forced to unbundle IE from Windows OS, their tactics have stayed remarkably the same,” Bickley noted.