They include West Texas, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Ohio, where tornadoes, hailstorms and high winds present new hazards. Zurich says severe weather has become the largest source of losses in its U.S. builders-risk portfolio over the past three years, surpassing fire as the industry’s dominant construction threat. Weather accounts for 32% of losses in Zurich’s data center portfolio, followed by fire and equipment damage. The second issue is compressed construction schedules. Operators are increasingly beginning operating portions of a campus where construction is complete and while construction continues elsewhere. That means welding and other, heavy equipment plus incomplete fire protection coexist with active server halls containing sensitive computing equipment. Beyond construction and to absolutely no surprise, Zurich identifies energy infrastructure as one of the defining challenges facing AI expansion. The report notes that U.S. data center electricity demand increased roughly 22% in a single year and is expected to nearly triple to approximately 134 gigawatts by 2030.

Infoblox announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Kentik, combining Infoblox’s authoritative DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (IPAM) data with Kentik’s network observability platform. Financial terms were not disclosed. Kentik was founded in 2014, originally as CloudHelix before rebranding the following year, and has raised more than $100 million in venture funding to date. The platform provides real-time visibility into network traffic and ingests flow data, routing intelligence, and device telemetry across data centers, cloud environments, WANs, and the public internet. In recent years, the company has enhanced its platform with an AI advisor that helps to accelerate investigations. Infoblox has spent more than two decades managing the DNS, DHCP, and IPAM services enterprises rely on to stay connected. In 2024, it first launched its Universal DDI SaaS platform for managing DNS, DHCP, and IP addresses from a single place, expanding in 2025 to more providers. DDI refers to the trio of core network services in IP networks: DNS, which turns domain names into IP addresses; DHCP, which assigns IP addresses to resources; and IPAM, which manages the network’s IP address infrastructure.

As AI data centers push past the limits of traditional compute architecture, the industry’s attention is moving deeper into the physical layer. GPUs, accelerators, power systems and cooling platforms still dominate the headlines, but the network fabric that connects those systems is becoming just as critical. A wave of recent announcements points to the same conclusion: future growth will depend not only on more compute, but on faster, denser, more efficient and more scalable optical connectivity. A new multi-source agreement is bringing together major technology companies to standardize expanded beam optical connectivity for AI data centers. University of Arizona research is powering a new optical switching technology designed to reduce the energy consumed by data center networks. STL is planning to invest up to $100 million in U.S. manufacturing capacity to support AI data center and telecom customers with optical connectivity products. Those developments are now being reinforced by a broader series of moves across the optical ecosystem: Corning’s major AI infrastructure partnerships with NVIDIA and Amazon, GlobalFoundries’ push into co-packaged optics, Sivers’ laser-array collaboration with GlobalFoundries, Wiwynn’s co-packaged optics demonstration at Computex, Credo’s acquisition of DustPhotonics, and emerging near-packaged optical interconnect designs from LightSpeed Photonics. Taken together, these announcements highlight a maturing market around the optical layer of AI infrastructure. The value is not simply faster data movement. It is about reducing deployment complexity, lowering operating overhead, supporting higher-density clusters, improving energy efficiency and strengthening the domestic supply chain behind AI-ready networks. Let’s drill down into what these announcements mean. Standards for the AI Optical Layer The launch of a new coalition focused on expanded beam optical, or EBO, connectivity reflects a practical challenge facing AI deployments: as clusters grow larger and more bandwidth-intensive, physical connections become harder to deploy, maintain and scale. 3M announced that it has joined

Each month Data Center Frontier, in partnership with Pkaza, posts some of the hottest data center career opportunities in the market. Here’s a look at some of the latest data center jobs posted on the Data Center Frontier jobs board, powered by Pkaza Critical Facilities Recruiting. Looking for Data Center Candidates? Check out Pkaza’s Active Candidate / Featured Candidate Hotlist CFD Engineer – Data Center Mechanical DesignNew York, NY (remote)This position is also available as a remote role anywhere in the US, in addition to key markets such as Cedar Rapids, IA; Kansas City, MO or White Plains, NY. Our client is an engineering design and commissioning company that has a national footprint and specializes in MEP critical facilities design. They provide design, commissioning, consulting and management expertise in the critical facilities space. They have a mindset to provide reliability, energy efficiency, and sustainable design expertise when providing these consulting services for enterprise, colocation and hyperscale companies. This career-growth minded opportunity offers exciting projects with leading-edge technology and innovation as well as competitive salaries and benefits. Electrical Commissioning Engineer New Albany, OH (limited travel)Non-Traveling CxA positions available in: Indianapolis, IN; Cedar Rapids, IA and Austin, TX. Traveling CxA Roles: New York, NY; White Plain, NY; Morristown, NJ; Dallas, TX; Richmond, VA; Ashburn, VA; Montvale, NJ; Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Phoenix, AZ; Salt Lake City, UT;  Kansas City, MO; Omaha, NE; Chesterton, IN or Chicago, IL. *** ALSO looking for a LEAD EE and ME CxA Agents and CxA PMs. *** Our client is an engineering design and commissioning company that has a national footprint and specializes in MEP critical facilities design. They provide design, commissioning, consulting and management expertise in the critical facilities space. They have a mindset to provide reliability, energy efficiency, sustainable design and LEED expertise when providing these consulting services

A Carrier Hotel Reimagined for Modern Colocation H5 formally announced its expansion into 325 Hudson, a 225,000 square-foot mixed-use building comprised of office, lab and data center uses, in 2021 through a partnership with real estate investment firm DivcoWest, describing its new location as a data center and carrier hotel in one of the world’s largest communications markets. At the time, H5 founder and CEO Josh Simms framed the move as an opportunity to expand an already-established interconnection ecosystem while supporting growing demand from cloud providers, content delivery networks, and communications carriers. That vision now appears fully realized inside the building. The facility today operates as both a traditional carrier hotel and a modern enterprise colocation environment. H5’s infrastructure footprint supports high-density deployments, A/B UPS power architecture, N+1 emergency generators, N+1 CRAC systems, and energy-efficient in-row cooling with cold aisle containment. The building also reflects the physical realities of Manhattan infrastructure engineering. Operators work within vertical constraints rather than sprawling horizontal campuses. Freight access, riser strategy, structured cabling pathways, and efficient floor utilization become critical operational variables. H5 highlighted several features tailored for those realities, including 13-foot slab-to-slab heights, 150 pounds-per-square-foot floor loading capability, secure loading access, and extensive pre-built conduit infrastructure.

For much of the data center industry’s history, project management has largely been viewed as an execution discipline: a collection of schedules, milestones, spreadsheets, and status meetings designed to shepherd individual facilities from groundbreaking to commissioning. The AI era is rapidly rendering that model obsolete. As hyperscalers, developers, utilities, EPC firms, telecom providers, equipment suppliers, and local governments converge around increasingly complex AI campuses, the challenge is no longer simply delivering projects on time. Rather, it is orchestrating an infrastructure manufacturing process that stretches from land acquisition and permitting through construction, operations, and ultimately asset modernization years later. That changing reality was a central theme during Data Center Frontier’s conversation with Sitetracker at Fiber Connect 2026. The company’s perspective reflects a broader shift underway across digital infrastructure: project management is evolving into lifecycle management, where financial planning, regulatory coordination, supply chain visibility, and operational readiness become inseparable parts of the same platform. Complexity Begins Before Construction Much of the attention surrounding AI infrastructure focuses on GPU deployments, liquid cooling, and power availability. Yet Sitetracker argues that many of today’s greatest operational headaches begin much earlier in the development process. According to Reilly McClure, Sr. Product Marketing Manager – Digital Infrastructure with Sitetracker, operators are increasingly seeking help with land acquisition, parcel management, and site identification as AI infrastructure expands into new markets. “There are so many variables that we need to track,” he explained. “The demand and the growth and the build-out for where all that infrastructure is going is becoming increasingly complex. They’re finding it just cannot be done on a spreadsheet.” That observation resonates across the industry. Finding suitable sites now requires simultaneously evaluating power availability, transmission timelines, fiber access, permitting requirements, environmental studies, municipal approvals, and community considerations; all while competing developers race to secure the same