AI Data Centres: Power and Cooling Become the New Bottleneck.

The AI infrastructure race is no longer just about chips — it's about whether facilities can be powered and cooled fast enough to keep up. At Data Centre World 2026, engineering leaders from Oracle, Nvidia, and Google described a shift from general-purpose IT environments to tightly integrated compute systems, with changes showing up across every layer of infrastructure — from power and cooling architectures to network design and construction timelines.

Rack densities are the clearest signal. Racks that once pushed 30–40 kW are now measured in hundreds of kilowatts, with designs approaching the megawatt range, and next-generation AI racks could reach 370 kW in 2026, according to Deloitte, making liquid cooling and advanced power architectures essential rather than optional.

Liquid cooling has moved from experimental to standard. Liquid-cooled cooling capacity will equal air-cooling capacity in 2025, and by the end of 2026 it will double air-cooling capacity, according to industry analysts speaking at Data Centre World. Google's Varun Sakalkar put it plainly: liquid cooling is no longer a debate — "the conversation is about standardization."

Power is now the binding constraint on where facilities get built at all. CBRE reports that power availability now outweighs connectivity in data centre site selection, with operators prioritising locations capable of delivering 300 MW+ of power capacity within tight deployment timelines. AI data centres in 2026 demand 100–750 MW per site, and operators are responding with a mix of grid upgrades, on-site generation, and — increasingly — nuclear. Nuclear adoption has grown from 11% three years ago to 33% today, with small modular reactors set to play a significant role.

The takeaway: 

The talent and supply chains around power delivery, liquid cooling, and modular construction are becoming as strategically important as the GPUs themselves — and just as hard to source.

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