As we enter 2025, the rise of AI has put data centres front and centre of business and government discourse. To power a generative AI future, data centre capacity needs to grow significantly – and quickly. But with that greater demand for compute comes the need for more power, more water, and more specialists. TechInformed […]
As we enter 2025, the rise of AI has put data centres front and centre of business and government discourse. To power a generative AI future, data centre capacity needs to grow significantly – and quickly. But with that greater demand for compute comes the need for more power, more water, and more specialists.
TechInformed asked industry experts for their predictions about the data centre landscape in the coming year, and how providers will both meet demand while considering the environmental impact of growth.
Increasing demands for data centres and computing power will make 2025 a pivotal year for energy usage
David King, senior principal product engineer, Cadence
“Data centres will face a pivotal moment next year as energy usage, especially to power AI, continues to rise. Facilities will start to realise that there really isn’t enough energy. While newly built, AI-optimised facilities can be better suited to handle these requirements, retrofitting older data centres to support increased power and cooling is required to meet demands. However, it is costly and complex.
“This pressure is prompting operators to plan both infrastructure upgrades and invest in purpose-built facilities designed to power AI. Amid these changes, digital twins will be crucial for enhancing data centre efficiency and sustainability in both new and existing data centres. By simulating physical facility environments, digital twins allow operators to optimise power distribution, improve cooling techniques, and test energy changes, helping to maximise resource use and reduce stranded capacity.
“This technology not only makes the most out of existing space, but it also supports sustainable growth, setting a new standard for energy-efficient, AI-capable data centres.”
Rami Jebara, co-founder and CTO, Hyperview
“Sustainability is critical. Future data centres must incorporate innovative cooling solutions, renewable energy sources, and smart energy management systems to minimise their carbon footprint. Efficiency and environmental responsibility will define future designs, enabling facilities to support power-intensive technologies like AI while staying eco-friendly.”
Rami Jebara, Hyperview
Fredrik Jansson, chief strategy and marketing & communications officer, atNorth
“2025 will be the year when corporate sustainability reporting will bring the environmental impact of digitalisation’s ‘dirty little secret’ — the colossal amount of energy used to power and cool digital infrastructure — to boardroom level, finally forcing organisations to address their digital carbon footprint.
“The introduction of legislation such as CSRD in the EU will require mandatory carbon footprint disclosures. Similarly, the updated Energy Efficiency Directive in the EU will require data centres to report on their sites’ Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).
“These figures will be published publicly similarly to annual corporate accounts, enabling a direct baseline comparison between businesses and undoubtedly influencing client and investor relations. To remain competitive, data-intensive businesses will have to take immediate action to reduce their digital carbon footprint. One way to do this is to consider a sustainable data centre partner.”
Rupert Bedell, CEO, Fasthosts
“This could be a tipping point for global sustainability goals. With data centres driving the AI revolution, how they manage resource consumption will determine whether targets like net zero by 2050 remain within reach or collapse under the weight of inaction. Buying carbon offsets will no longer be enough. We need to make meaningful, structural changes.
“AI adoption is soaring, creating opportunities across industries and pushing data centre infrastructure to its limits. Training and running AI models requires enormous computing power, which drives energy consumption and generates large amounts of heat. Yet AI is also part of the solution. AI-powered tools are helping data centres manage resources more effectively, improving energy use and cooling efficiency.
“Expandable servers provide a flexible foundation for data centres to scale up to meet growing demand without the waste of replacing entire systems. Or take advanced cooling systems, like liquid cooling, better equipped to manage the heat generated by smaller, hotter hardware. As traditional air cooling becomes less effective, these more efficient techniques will be key to handling the challenges of modern computing.”
Mark Fenton, product engineering director at Cadence
“In 2025, data centres will face mounting pressure to reconcile AI’s surging energy requirements with strict sustainability goals, sparking an industry-wide rethink on AI applications. The infrastructure required to deliver on AI is poised to drive a 160% increase in data centre power demand. This challenge is creating a pivotal moment for data centres to support high-density compute loads while advancing their environmental commitments.
“Companies will face a new crossroads. Many that initially rushed into AI, driven by competitive urgency, will now reevaluate its financial and energy impact, with some in-house setups costing up to $300,000 in hardware alone.
“This shift is likely to push organisations toward selective, high-value AI applications that provide stronger operational returns, including within data centres themselves. However, demand will remain high, stretching capacity to its limits.
“As such, tools like digital twins will be essential for data centres to meet AI goals sustainably, allowing operators to proactively manage power, integrate renewable sources, and optimise cooling measures to meet AI’s GPU usage demands. With these advancements, data centres can help organisations make impactful and environmentally responsible AI investments.”
Andrew Beal, chief architect, Markerstudy
“As organisations strive to become greener, their data centres will play a crucial role in reducing their carbon footprint. The increasing demand from compute-intensive AI use cases will jeopardise this effort. To manage the heightened power demands and lower their carbon footprint, data centres will need to adopt more advanced cooling systems and renewable energy sources.
“This will drive the construction of large data centre campuses in regions with access to low-carbon energy sources, further supporting sustainability goals.”
Niklas Lindqvist, a European data centre expert at data centre consultancy Onnec
“AI’s rapid growth is straining energy grids, driving a shift toward renewables like wind, solar, and hydropower, which are more accessible and adaptable than nuclear power. While hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft target nuclear power by 2030, its long timelines and regulatory barriers hinder scalability. Meanwhile, data centres are becoming ‘smart prosumers,’ repurposing waste heat and feeding power back to grids, helping to stabilise and transform energy systems to meet surging demand.”
Artificial Intelligence will continue to pressure data centre demand while also playing a role in managing facilities
Patrick Smith, CTO EMEA, Pure Storage
“Sustainability goals will be put at risk by AI and the incoming wave of data centres. As the demand for AI and associated data storage continues to grow, sustainability is once again going to be in the spotlight.
“As AI drove greater use of computing resources, which had a negative impact on energy reduction goals, sustainability was sidelined. But now, it is rising on the corporate agenda: how organisations view and implement sustainable practices will again be on upper management’s radar.
“More organisations will discuss their energy transition and how they will power the increased demand for data centres. With some of the largest companies adopting nuclear energy to meet these demands, there will be more scrutiny on this decision.”
Mark Fenton, product engineering director, Cadence
“AI agents are poised to secure their position in workplaces industry-wide in 2025, and data centres are no exception. Software providers in this sector will increasingly explore integrating powerful large language models (LLMs), such as those based on ChatGPT, into data centre tools.
“While this offers transformative potential, it also introduces significant challenges due to the resource-intensive nature of LLMs. Cadence’s testing of advanced LLMs makes it clear that even relatively modest setups require substantial infrastructure for training and operations, with each model functioning as a “personal assistant” for operators.
“For an AI assistant to be well informed, they need significant training to understand the questions asked and provide the correct answers. As such, for assistants to provide those answers quickly, businesses will require low latency and high-speed compute running the show.”
Rami Jebara, co-founder and CTO, Hyperview
“AI and machine learning workloads will be the primary drivers of change in data centre design. These technologies require immense computational power, increasing energy use and greater cooling demands. Traditional data centres, designed for standard server racks, must transition to high-density setups utilising GPUs or specialised hardware like TPUs.”
Giordano Albertazzi, CEO, Vertiv
“AI will continue to reshape the data centre industry in 2025. There will be increased industry innovation and integration to support high-density computing, regulatory scrutiny around AI, and an increasing focus on sustainability and cybersecurity efforts.”
Impact on business: Which technologies will significantly influence businesses and enterprises?
Power and cooling infrastructure will need to keep pace with computing densification. In 2025, the impact of compute-intense workloads will intensify. Advanced computing will continue shifting from CPU to GPU to leverage the latter’s parallel computing power and modern chips’ higher thermal design point. This will further stress existing power and cooling systems and push data centre operators toward cold-plate and immersion cooling solutions that remove heat at the rack level. This trend will impact enterprise data centres as AI use expands beyond early cloud and colocation providers.
Elizabeth Hart, head of investor relations, Goldacre
“Artificial intelligence is a significant driver of this demand, so it’s difficult to see it abate overnight. The proliferation of AI requires immense computational power.
“Countries need to look at safeguarding their power supplies: this requires a review of energy security to ensure that global economies are not at the mercy of rogue states to supply their energy requirements to ensure that markets can stay online and protect power lines and other critical infrastructure from external threats.
“Investors will look for regions with policies with stable and renewable energy supplies. Countries that can prove their might in this area will emerge with the spoils of success: billions of dollars of investments in data centres.”
The data centre workforce will go through a change in 2025 as the speed of growth and a generational shift will allow for more diversity in the typically male-dominated sector
Fredrik Jansson, chief strategy and marketing & communications officer, atNorth
“atNorth hopes that 2025 will be the year that the data centre industry — traditionally male-dominated — will increasingly recognise the importance of diversity in inspiring creativity and innovation.
Fredrik Jansson, atNorth
“With the speed at which the industry is growing, it is not surprising that there is a significant skills gap that needs to be addressed. Whilst most businesses tend to hire within their own ‘gene pool’, it is essential to actively source talent with different skills if the industry is to evolve.”
David King, senior principal product engineer, Cadence
“From 2025 onwards, the data centre industry will see a substantial generational shift as seasoned professionals retire and younger, tech-savvy talent bring specialised skills in AI, automation and sustainability.
“Gen Z’s entry into the workforce brings a strong focus on purpose-driven careers, where sustainability is a core value. This generation’s commitment will likely drive more talent to the data centre industry as they hope to help promote greener practices, such as implementing advanced cooling methods, reducing inefficient resource utilisation and bringing down stranded capacity.
“As these professionals assume leadership roles, data centres are set to become more agile, eco-friendly and resilient. This evolution will close the current skills gap and redefine the industry’s approach to sustainable innovation, positioning it for a future led by Gen Z’s commitment to impactful, environmentally conscious operations.”
Read more here: Planning approved for Europe’s largest cloud and AI data centre
