The data center design choices that will stick in 2026

Love has no bounds, and neither do data centers, with designers considering some wild options for future facilities—including underwater, underground, and even outer space.

This was a memorable year for data center development. In November, Google announced its “moonshot” plans to put AI data centers in space, an idea that is increasingly gaining traction among data center researchers. Over the summer, China made headlines for its incoming wind-powered commercial underwater data centers. And if those locations weren’t crazy enough, Lenovo has even pitched floating data centers and data center bunkers as possibilities for the future.

Beyond exotic locations, data centers have also been upgraded with next-generation cooling hardware and cutting-edge, high-density designs, all of which are meant to address growing power and energy demands fueled largely by AI.

David Ebert, chief AI and data science officer at the University of Arizona, told IT Brew that the energy demand problem has been growing since the “start of internet search engines.”

“The demand for the computing and processing power that’s needed today is much larger than it was a decade ago, and that has continued to grow, and there have been a lot of innovations in that space,” he said.

IT Brew caught up with Ebert to discuss what’s to come for data center design as power and energy demands continue to rise.

Responses below have been edited for length and clarity.

Have you seen any recent data center design choices that have been effective from a power perspective?

In recent years, there have been a lot of improvements in cooling technology for data centers. It’s really something where people are taking innovative approaches. They’re using new cooling technology to reduce the amount of resources that are needed for the same amount of effective cooling. They’re working on optimizing design for the centers so that they consider this. They are looking at locations where they’re located, so that they can take advantage of natural resources, and there’s a lot of work in terms of cooling in the architecture that actually you put into the data center.

Do you think we’re going to see a space race from hyperscalers and other players in the data center industry?

There is a strong possibility that we will see this, and I see there will be a lot of deployed centers in space. I think it’s a few years off before that becomes a trend. There have also been previous attempts [at unusual locations]. Microsoft had a project many years ago of actually putting data centers offshore and having them submerged in the ocean and creating them so that they would be green and environmentally sensitive to the environment around them and turn into natural coral reefs. And so there’s a lot of alternatives to deal with both the heat and energy of that.

Are there any other data center-related design choices you think that we’ll see in 2026?

What I think you will see is more novel hardware designs and processors that are on the market, that are being adapted and used in data centers. There’s a lot of innovations that have been going on to get more efficient chips and to get things that are power-aware. Sustainable computing and power-aware computing have grown in importance.

People are really focusing on doing new chip designs. Some of the manufacturers…have basically designed chips that use lower power in the computers, and you also have systems now that have dynamic power management for the actual chips and are determining when you need to turn on certain components so that you can make them more sustainable.