Data Center Power and Cooling Trends for the AI Era
TechRepublic, Thursday, June 18th, 2026
An Omdia report says AI's soaring power densities will force a fundamental redesign of data center power and cooling in 2026.
Drew Robb reports on an Omdia analysis finding that AI workloads are straining data centers both in getting enough power into facilities and in dissipating the resulting heat.
Omdia analyst Shen Wang says that under the dual pressures of soaring power densities and gigawatt-scale expansion, 2026 will see power and cooling systems fundamentally redesigned to bridge the gap to gigawatt campuses.
Liquid-cooled capacity equaled air cooling in 2025 and is expected to double it by the end of 2026, with cold plate shipments surging from 8 million in 2025 toward 356 million by 2030.
The article also notes full-stack liquid cooling on NVIDIA's Rubin platform and a shift toward HVDC and solid-state transformer architectures, with global data center CAPEX projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030.