Beyond The Chiller: Rethinking Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) Through System-Level Energy Recovery
DataCenter Knowledge, Friday, February 13th, 2026
Power usage effectiveness needs to be approached through the lens of innovations in cooling and energy efficiency, writes Stephen Richards.
Power usage effectiveness, or PUE, has become the defining metric for data center efficiency as artificial intelligence workloads push facilities toward unprecedented power consumption. Cooling alone can account for 30-40% of a data center's total electricity consumption, according to the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory.