Brandon White, Engineer, Experimental Research
A data center is a facility that houses computing, storage, and networking equipment required to run digital services—from cloud platforms to AI workloads. Once thought of as simple “server rooms,” today's data centers are hyperscale campuses consuming hundreds of megawatts. A modern example of server racks found in a compute center is shown in Figure 1.
Data centers have existed since the 1940s and 1950s, beginning as secure, climate-controlled rooms for early mainframes. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the modern internet era drove the creation of colocation facilities and hyperscale cloud centers. For decades, improvements in semiconductor efficiency (Dennard scaling) reduced heat per transistor, helping stabilize overall heat loads.
That trend has now reversed dramatically. The rise of AI, GPU clusters, and high-density computing has pushed heat loads upward at an exponential rate. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), electricity demand from commercial computing—which directly drives cooling requirements—is projected to grow from 8% of commercial electricity use in 2024 to 20% by 2050 [1].
Global market analysis reinforces this trend. JLL's 2026 Global Data Center Outlook notes that AI is reshaping facility design, with rack densities approaching 100 kW and liquid-cooling becoming standard. Nearly 100 GW of new data-center capacity is expected to be added worldwide between 2026 and 2030, with AI expected to represent half of all workloads by 2030—further escalating cooling demand [2].
Looking specifically at the U.S., S&P Global forecasts that national data-center electricity consumption will climb from 280 TWh in 2024 to 530 TWh by 2028, nearly doubling in four years. Such rapid growth concentrates heat-load challenges in regions like Northern Virginia, Dallas, and Phoenix—areas already facing grid congestion and constraints on cooling water and energy availability [3].
Across all credible projections, one trend is clear: heat load growth is no longer linear. It is accelerating rapidly due to AI, dense compute architectures, and the slowdown of traditional efficiency gains. As data-center operators respond with liquid cooling, heat-recovery systems, and on-site power generation, the industry is entering a new era in which thermal management drives design as much as compute performance itself.
References
- Courtney Sourmehi, Electricity Use for Commerical Computing Could Surpass Space Cooling, Ventilation, U.S. Energy Information Administration, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65564 (25 June 2025).
- 2026 Global Data Center Outlook, https://www.jll.com/en-us/insights/market-outlook/data-center-outlook (5 January 2026).
- Adam Wilson and Tony Lenoir, US Datacenter and Energy Outlook — Powering the AI Economy, https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/research/us-datacenter-and-energy-outlook-powering-the-ai-economy (13 June 2024).