What forces are driving the most significant change in the data industry in 2026? We have assembled a roster of experts in technologies ranging from cooling to cabling, and from metering to modularity, to answer that question from their perspectives. In their poignant narrations, these experts delve into the technical, economic, and cultural underpinnings of the data center industry’s dynamic evolution.

Speakers TBD

AI is driving explosive growth in data centers, with rack power densities continuing to rise. Traditional power distribution approaches are being pushed to their limits as safety concerns, large equipment footprints, deployment complexity, and scalability constraints make it harder to support next-generation AI infrastructure.

This webinar will explore how Digital Electricity®, a UL-listed Class 4 Fault-Managed Power system, enables a new approach to DC power distribution for data center operators. By allowing high levels of DC power to be deployed using installation practices similar to communications cabling, Digital Electricity helps data centers deploy power faster, scale more flexibly, and better meet the demands of high-density AI infrastructure. In addition to improving safety, the intelligence built into every circuit provides deeper visibility into power system health and performance.

Attendees will gain practical insights into how to rethink power distribution for both new AI-ready data centers and retrofit applications, with strategies to improve safety, density, speed of deployment, and long-term scalability.

As AI servers push rack power toward and beyond the 1 MW threshold, direct-to-chip (DTC) liquid cooling has become unavoidable — but not all approaches are equal.

This session demystifies the design, cost, and maintenance differences between single-phase and two-phase DTC cooling systems for both greenfield AI factories and brownfield retrofits.

Panelists will tackle:

• System Architecture: How 1P and 2P loops differ from CDU to cold plate, and how each integrates with existing facility water systems.
• Performance & Reliability: Heat flux thresholds, pump reliability, fluid management from water-based 1P loops to dielectric refrigerant handling in 2P systems, leak risk, and serviceability in production environments.
• Installation & Maintenance: Lessons from hyperscale and OEM pilots — the practical realities of install labor, fluid management, and long-term O&M.
• Retrofit Viability: When two-phase pays off, and when single-phase remains the smarter path.
• NVIDIA’s Role: How NVIDIA’s reference designs, qualified vendors, and rack standards are shaping coolant selection, manifold design, and CDU integration.

This roundtable will provide an unvarnished view into the operational trade-offs behind liquid cooling architectures — helping operators, engineers, and investors decide which system aligns with their density roadmap, risk tolerance, and retrofit constraints.

In many environments and applications, media-based direct evaporative cooling is effective in many applications and environments including data halls, penthouses, office areas, condenser pre-cooling, and gas turbine pre-cooling. This session will review these applications, then cover the basics of saturation efficiency and achievable wet-bulb temperatures. An examination of an average summer day with hourly graphs will show that the highest outdoor temperature coincides with the driest air. The session also will compare different cooling technologies including Munters’ FA6 and FP3 cassettes along with the MRM product line. It will describe how direct evaporative cooling can operate with zero discharge and provide detailed information on drift and mist eliminators.

As data centers rapidly evolve to support 100G, 400G, and emerging high-speed applications, high-density fiber connectors such as MPO/MTP and very small form factor (VSFF) interfaces introduce new challenges for testing and validation. These connectors combine high fiber counts, compact form factors, and increased sensitivity to contamination, making traditional testing approaches insufficient without proper adaptation.

This session examines best practices for testing high-density fiber links in modern data center environments, including Tier 1 (insertion loss) and Tier 2 (OTDR) methodologies, limit selection, polarity verification, and multi-fiber measurement considerations. Participants will also explore critical inspection and cleaning workflows—following the “inspect, clean, re-inspect” process—to mitigate contamination, which remains a leading cause of fiber network failures.

Attendees will gain practical guidance on selecting appropriate test equipment, adapting procedures for MPO and emerging connector types, and overcoming common challenges such as closely spaced events, polarity complexity, and multi-lane performance dependencies. The session provides actionable insights to ensure accurate certification, reduce troubleshooting time, and improve overall physical layer reliability in high-density data center deployments.

As AI adoption accelerates and compute density surges, data center power architectures are approaching a breaking point. Traditional AC distribution and sidecar-based designs are no longer sufficient to support the scale and efficiency required for next-generation infrastructure.

This session explores a transformative shift in energy delivery—from incremental upgrades to a fundamentally new approach powered by 800 VDC. Anchored around the emergence of the 1 MW rack, we will examine how high-voltage DC architectures redefine efficiency, streamline power conversion, and enable the scalability needed for AI-driven and hyperscale environments.

Attendees will gain a practical understanding of how to design and deploy high-density, DC-powered systems—from safety and reliability considerations to integration within existing facilities. Learn how leading operators are leveraging 800 VDC to reduce losses, shrink infrastructure, and build more sustainable, future-ready data centers.

Join us to discover why 800 VDC is not just an evolution in power delivery—it is a critical enabler of the next era of digital infrastructure.