Data Center Trends & Cooling Strategies to Watch in 2026

TL;DR

• AI remains the primary force driving 2026 data center trends.
• Industry growth accelerates while power, water, and land constraints tighten.
• Sustainability initiatives intensify as environmental impact grows.
• Efficiency metrics evolve beyond PUE, with greater focus on power-to-compute performance.
• Edge and modular deployments expand to meet AI workload demands.
• Cooling strategies continue to trend toward liquid cooling, AI-driven thermal management, and heat reuse.

Whether you’ve been in the data center sector for one year or five, you’ve seen firsthand the pace of change across data center developments. As operators prepare for another year of progress, it’s worth taking a closer look at the latest trends in data center technology that are directing data center operations and the emerging priorities that will define the landscape in 2026.

AI Is (Still) the Driving Force Shaping the Data Center Industry

When we covered data center trends in 2025, we described AI as “the most transformative force in the data center industry.” Looking back, that proved true: AI touched virtually all areas of the data center ecosystem, creating unprecedented performance demands and intensifying pressure on energy efficiency, IT architecture, and cooling. 

In 2026, that momentum continues to accelerate at full force. The trends we’re seeing now are a direct evolution of those from 2025, but with clearer direction and higher stakes. Competitive advantage in 2026 won’t come from having the most infrastructure. Instead, the data centers that will lead will be those with the most intelligent, efficient, and sustainable infrastructure, purpose-built for the realities of AI at scale.

The growth of AI infrastructure raises three important questions for the year ahead:

• What macro trends are shaping data center operations in 2026?
• Which deployment models are gaining momentum to support AI growth?
• How must cooling technologies evolve to meet AI-driven thermal demands?

What’s Shaping the Data Center Industry in 2026?

At a macro level, several major trends are defining how the data center industry evolves in 2026:

Market Growth Will Continue

The scale of AI-driven demand is pushing the data center industry into one of its fastest growth cycles. MarketsandMarkets projects that the global AI data center market will quadruple in size between 2025 and 2030, increasing from approximately $236 billion to over $933 billion. 

Hyperscalers are fueling this surge through investments in GPU clusters, AI training infrastructure, and next-generation data center campuses, pushing AI infrastructure spending more than 40% higher year-over-year in 2026. According to McKinsey & Company, meeting global compute requirements through 2030 may require nearly $7 trillion in data center investments. 

Resource Constraints Will Tighten

This massive growth in data centers’ footprint confronts the industry with resource limitations that challenge data center expansion:

• Power availability is becoming the most urgent bottleneck. Deloitte forecasts that U.S. AI data center power demand could jump from 4 GW in 2024 to 123 GW by 2035, a more than thirtyfold increase. Globally, Goldman Sachs expects data center electricity use to rise by 50% by 2027 and up to 165% by 2030.
  
• Water consumption is escalating as well. WestWater Research projects a 170% increase in data-center-related water use in the U.S. by the end of the decade.
  
• Land, equipment, and skilled labor remain difficult to secure, creating additional challenges for operators.

Sustainability Will Become a Target

Data centers already have a concerning environmental impact, and rising AI workloads are set to exacerbate it further. Morgan Stanley projected that the data center industry could emit up to 2.5 billion tons of CO₂ through 2030, underscoring the scale of the challenge ahead.

Against this backdrop, sustainability in 2026 is shifting from a secondary consideration to a top operational KPI. Practically, this means data center operators will increasingly embed sustainability into the earliest stages of infrastructure planning and place greater emphasis on metrics like PUE and WUE. 

Efficiency Metrics Will Evolve

As AI workloads dominate power consumption, operators are also beginning to look beyond facility energy efficiency into Power Compute Effectiveness (PCE) — a metric that evaluates how effectively consumed power is converted into usable compute output. Unlike PUE, which measures infrastructure overhead, PCE connects energy use directly to AI performance, making it a more meaningful KPI in high-density, accelerator-driven environments.

Taken together, PUE, WUE, and PCE reflect a 2026 mindset focused less on infrastructure efficiency alone and more on maximizing meaningful compute output under increasingly constrained power, water, and land conditions.

Booming Data Center Deployments

As high-density, hyperscale facilities drive the AI surge, they’re also accelerating the deployment models that extend capacity faster and closer to users.

Edge Data Centers Move Computing Closer to Users

With IoT, 5G, and real-time applications growing rapidly, centralized processing struggles to deliver AI services to users far from major data center hubs. To meet these needs, organizations are shifting away from a purely centralized approach and instead are building distributed networks of smaller facilities located closer to end users.

In 2026, this shift accelerates. Following major investments in 2025, edge data centers are expanding into factories, logistics centers, hospitals, and retail sites, and AI inference workloads are also increasingly offloaded from hyperscalers to these localized nodes. With these drivers combined, the global edge data center market is expected to surpass $300 billion this year.

Modular Data Centers Scale Rapidly for AI Demand

Speed and scalability are now competitive advantages, and modular data centers are becoming one of the fastest ways to deliver both. In 2026, operators will increasingly turn to prefabricated, factory-built modules that deploy in a fraction of the time compared to traditional builds, often in months rather than years.

This model’s benefits go well beyond deployment speed. Modular designs offer predictable reliability, streamlined scalability, and improved energy efficiency, which are all critical factors in AI-driven environments. As a result, the global modular data center market is projected to grow at a 17.4% CAGR from 2025 to 2030, according to Grand View Research.

How Must Cooling Adapt? 3 Key Data Center Cooling Trends

The AI surge forces data center operators to rethink their cooling strategies, especially as cooling already accounts for about 40% of total energy use. In reality, the data center cooling innovations that gained momentum in 2025 will continue to advance in 2026, with operators taking a more deliberate approach to scalable, efficient, and sustainable cooling solutions.

Here are three of the latest trends in data center cooling technologies:

Liquid Cooling Becomes Mainstream

Liquid cooling checks nearly every box for an AI data center’s cooling needs. Its superior heat-transfer capability makes it far more effective for high-density GPU workloads, and it typically requires less energy than air cooling, improving overall sustainability and lowering operational costs. 

Thanks to these advantages, we’ll see a significant surge in liquid cooling adoption in 2026, particularly direct-to-chip cooling, immersion cooling, and CDU-based liquid cooling systems that facilitate efficient coolant distribution at scale. 

AI Steps In to Cool AI

Traditional cooling methods alone can’t support the thermal demands of AI environments. Yet, introducing AI into AI data centers changes the picture, with a growing number of AI-native facilities emerging in 2026.

Cooling systems incorporating AI capabilities enable continuous monitoring of workload conditions and automatic adjustment of cooling output as demands fluctuate. By making cooling dynamic instead of static, these systems adapt to the actual thermal needs of AI compute, leading to:

• Reduced energy waste 
• Higher overall efficiency
• Less need for on-site intervention
• Proactive maintenance enabled by predictive analytics
• Extended system longevity

Heat Recovery Becomes a Strategic Priority

As sustainability becomes a core KPI, heat reuse is emerging as a practical strategy for reducing environmental impact. Instead of venting waste heat into the atmosphere, operators are increasingly capturing and redirecting it for secondary uses, such as district heating, agricultural applications, industrial processes, or warming nearby facilities.

In 2026, more AI data centers are expected to integrate heat-recovery infrastructure directly into new builds. Combined with liquid cooling systems that enhance heat capture efficiency, heat reuse is becoming an important lever for reducing emissions, improving ESG performance, and transforming a byproduct of AI computing into a valuable resource.

Strengthen Your Cooling Strategy for 2026

As it appears today, AI is reshaping every layer of the data center, and its impact on the industry will only deepen, stirring changes and raising the bar for how quickly operators must adapt. 

As these data center industry trends reshape the landscape, AIRSYS continues to pioneer data center cooling innovation, delivering solutions engineered for the demands of high-density, AI-driven environments. Explore our PowerOne™ product line for HPC data centers, and contact us to discuss how we can support your cooling strategy for 2026 and beyond.