Industry Leaders Share 2026 Data Centre Predictions for a High-Tech, Sustainable Future

  • Markets & Leadership, Opinion
Images of five industry leaders in the data centre industry on a blurred purple tinted background image of a data centre server room

Executive Summary

  • We’re almost in the new year and it’s time for us to look towards what’s coming next. 2026 data centre industry predictions indicate unprecedented growth driven by AI, high-performance computing, and hyperscale workloads, creating new demands on energy and infrastructure.
  • Industry leaders remind us that with great power comes great responsibility. Balancing rapid growth with sustainability, efficiency, and reliability will define the winners in this next chapter.

 

We are on the brink of another new year and tomorrow’s creative minds will bring new innovations to the data centre industry, supporting this next generation of AI-ready infrastructure.

At Data Centre Insight, we’re at the forefront of the tidal wave of change shaping the data centre industry, delivering the latest market trends, news, and expert insights. To explore what’s next, we’ve spoken with several industry leaders to share their perspectives on the data centre industry in 2026.

Tim Andrews, Country Manager of Janitza, UK, states:

“2026 will be a defining year as AI workloads intensify the collision between ambitious deployment targets and infrastructure reality. Power demand is projected to surge dramatically, with AI-related infrastructure spend potentially reaching $490 billion globally, yet grid connection queues extend years into the future.

“The industry must move beyond capacity planning to address power quality challenges that threaten equipment reliability. AI’s nonlinear loads create harmonic distortion and phase imbalances that traditional monitoring cannot capture. Success requires real-time visibility into electrical parameters at millisecond intervals, monitoring transients, voltage harmonics, and rapid load fluctuations.

“Operators who invest in sophisticated power quality infrastructure today will differentiate themselves in an increasingly constrained market, whilst those relying on legacy approaches risk costly downtime and missed opportunities.”

Senior Marketing Manager of Soben, part of Accenture, Helena Mubiru, predicts:

“We’ll see Europe’s data centre map shift significantly in 2026. With power scarcity slowing growth in traditional FLAP-D markets, investment will move towards the Nordics, Southern Europe and emerging Mediterranean connectivity hubs. Markets that can combine renewable energy, streamlined planning and community support will pull ahead.”

Vertiv’s current chief procurement officer and named as president, Europe, Middle East and Africa as of January 1, 2026, Paul Ryan, said:

“There are several data centre trends that we expect to see accelerate in 2026.  Gigawatt-scale AI factories will rely on new power strategies, including 800 VDC architectures, to meet AI workload demands with increased performance and energy efficiency. There will also be a shift toward partial or complete grid independence, with Bring-Your-Own-Power strategies, leveraging battery energy storage systems (BESS) and energy alternatives (including wind, solar, natural gas turbines and even geothermal energy) to provide increased control over energy availability. We will also expect to see organisations adopting digital twin technology for data centre design, but also for efficient and resilient operations.”

Chief Commercial Officer of Conapto, Stefan Nilsson, predicts:

“Going into 2026, the challenge of securing high-density, AI-ready data center capacity will only intensify. The rapid shift toward liquid-cooled hardware, driven by next-generation AI systems where vendors like Nvidia are moving fully to liquid cooling, means many legacy facilities simply can’t keep up. Even though operators are building out new capacity, construction lead times remain longer than when customers actually need it, so available capacity will continue to be difficult to find. In this landscape, purpose-built, sustainable, liquid-ready sites like those in Stockholm will play an increasingly critical role.”

Matthew Baynes, Vice President, Strategic Partners, Cloud and Service Provider of Schneider Electric, states:

“As AI adoption accelerates across every sector, 2026 will mark the moment when the UK’s data-centre landscape must scale to meet the pace of demand. With an estimated 477 facilities already in operation, the UK ranks as the world’s third-largest market, but the trajectory ahead reflects a new level of ambition. A wave of planned sites across London, the South East, Wales, Scotland and Greater Manchester signals a shift toward not just more capacity, but a smarter, strategically distributed network of AI Factories designed for next-generation workloads.”

As we look toward 2026, the trajectory of data centres is clear: there is potential for huge growth and scalability if we can keep up with power demands, infrastructure innovation and sustainability requirements.

Industry leaders remind us that with great power comes great responsibility. Balancing rapid growth with sustainability, efficiency, and reliability will define the winners in this next chapter.

The coming years will not just test our infrastructure, but also our ingenuity. Data centres have the potential to be trailblazers in smart energy use, green innovation, and resilient design. The challenge is immense, but so is the opportunity: those who anticipate, adapt, and innovate will shape the data-driven world of tomorrow.

 

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