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Data Center Trends in 2025: Vertiv Forecasts Industry Efforts to Support, Enable, Use and Regulate Artificial Intelligence

Posted on by L. Dreeye
Data Center Trends in 2025: Vertiv Forecasts Industry Efforts to Support, Enable, Use and Regulate Artificial Intelligence

Vertiv makes predictions for data centers. (Image: supplied)

Vertiv makes predictions for data centers. (Image: supplied)

Artificial intelligence continues to change the face of the data center industry, a reality reflected in the 2025 data center trends forecast from Vertiv (NYSE: VRT), a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and business continuity solutions. Vertiv experts expect increased industry innovation and integration to support high-density computing, regulatory scrutiny of artificial intelligence, and an increased focus on sustainability and cybersecurity efforts.

“Our experts have correctly identified the rise of artificial intelligence and the need to move toward more sophisticated liquid and air cooling strategies as a trend for 2024, and activity on this front is expected to further accelerate and evolve in 2025,” said Vertiv CEO Giordano . (Gio) Albertazzi. “As AI rack densities reach triple and quadruple digit kilowatts, the need for advanced and scalable solutions to power and cool these racks, minimize their environmental impact, and empower these new AI factories has never been greater. We expect significant progress on this front in 2025, and our customers are demanding it.”

According to Vertiv experts, the 2025 trends will most likely emerge in the data center industry:

1. Innovation in power and cooling infrastructure to keep pace with computing densification: In 2025, the impact of compute-intensive workloads will increase and the industry will be able to cope with sudden changes in a variety of ways. Advanced computing will continue to move from the CPU to the GPU to take advantage of the latter’s parallel computing power and the higher design temperatures of modern chips. This will place additional stress on existing power and cooling systems and will push data center operators to use cold and immersion cooling solutions that remove heat at the rack level. This trend will impact enterprise data centers as the use of AI moves beyond early cloud and colocation providers.

  • AI racks will require UPS systems, batteries, power distribution equipment, and higher power density distribution gear to handle AI loads that can instantly fluctuate from 10% idle to 150% overload.
  • Hybrid cooling systems with liquid-to-liquid, liquid-to-air and liquid-to-refrigerant configurations will evolve in rack-mount, perimeter and row cabinet models that can be deployed in existing and new applications.
  • Liquid cooling systems will increasingly be combined with proprietary high-density, dedicated UPS systems to ensure continuous operation.
  • Servers will increasingly be integrated with the infrastructure needed to support them, including factory-integrated liquid cooling, ultimately making manufacturing and assembly more efficient, faster deployment, smaller hardware footprints, and increased system energy efficiency.

2. Data centers prioritize energy affordability issues: Overly expanded networks and skyrocketing power demands are changing the way data centers consume power. Globally, data centers use on average 1-2% of the world’s electricity, but artificial intelligence is driving increased consumption that is likely to push this figure to 3-4% by 2030. utilities are unable to cope, attracting regulatory attention from governments around the world (including potential restrictions on data center construction and energy use) and dramatically increasing the costs and carbon emissions that data center organizations are seeking to control. These pressures are forcing organizations to prioritize energy efficiency and sustainability even more than in the past.

Vertiv makes predictions for data centers. (Image: supplied)

Vertiv makes predictions for data centers. (Image: supplied)

In 2024, we predicted a trend towards alternative energy sources and microgrid deployments, and in 2025 we are seeing an acceleration of this trend with a real movement towards prioritizing and finding energy efficient solutions and energy alternatives that are new to the field. Fuel cells and alternative battery chemistries are becoming increasingly available for microgrids. In the longer term, several companies are developing small modular reactors for data centers and other large power users, with availability expected around the end of the decade. Progress on this front will be worth watching in 2025.

3. Industry participants collaborate to develop artificial intelligence factories: Average rack densities have been rising steadily over the past few years, but for an industry that maintained an average density of 8.2 kW in 2020, AI factory rack projections of 500 to 1000 kW or higher soon represent an unprecedented breakthrough. As a result of rapid change, chip designers, customers, power and cooling infrastructure manufacturers, utilities and other industry stakeholders will increasingly collaborate to develop and support transparent roadmaps to enable AI adoption. This collaboration extends to AI-powered development tools that accelerate the design and production of standardized and customized designs. In the coming year, chipmakers, infrastructure designers and customers will increasingly collaborate and move toward manufacturing partnerships that enable true IT and infrastructure integration.

4. AI makes cybersecurity harder and easier: The increasing frequency and severity of ransomware attacks is leading to a new, broader view of cybersecurity processes and the role the data center community plays in preventing such attacks. A third of all attacks last year involved some form of ransomware or extortion, and today’s attackers are using artificial intelligence tools to intensify their attacks, cast a wider net and take more sophisticated approaches. Increasingly, attacks begin with AI-based compromises of control systems, embedded or connected equipment, and infrastructure systems that do not always meet the same security requirements as other network components. Without due diligence, even the most sophisticated data center can be rendered useless.

Vertiv CEO Giordano (Gio) Albertazzi. (Image: supplied)

Vertiv CEO Giordano (Gio) Albertazzi. (Image: supplied)

As cybercriminals continue to use AI to increase the frequency of their attacks, cybersecurity experts, network administrators and data center operators will have to keep up by developing their own sophisticated AI-powered security technologies. While the fundamentals and best practices of defense in depth and diligence remain the same, the changing nature, source, and frequency of attacks add nuance to modern cybersecurity efforts.

5. Government and industry regulators address issues of artificial intelligence and energy use: While our 2023 forecasts focus on government regulation of energy use, in 2025 we expect regulation to increasingly focus on the use of AI itself. Governments and regulators around the world are racing to assess the implications of AI and develop frameworks to govern its use. The trend towards AI sovereignty – national control or influence over the development, implementation and regulation of AI, as well as regulatory frameworks aimed at governing AI – is the focus of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Law, as well as China’s Cybersecurity Law (CSL) and AI Safety Governance Framework. . Denmark recently opened its own sovereign AI supercomputer, and many other countries have undertaken their own sovereign AI projects and legislative processes to further develop the regulatory framework, indicating the trajectory of this trend. Some form of guidance is inevitable, and restrictions are possible, although unlikely.

Initial steps will focus on the application of this technology, but as the focus on energy consumption, water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions increases, regulations could expand to types of AI applications and data center resource consumption. In 2025, governance will still be local or regional rather than global, and the consistency and severity of enforcement will vary widely.

For more information on data center trends in 2025, visit Vertiv.com.