Driven by the AI revolution, the data centre construction boom is now a major economic force. This is injecting hundreds of billions of dollars directly into the economy for construction, specialized labour, and the procurement of IT hardware. This scale of investment necessitates a fundamental, strategic evolution in data centre design to meet economic and technical realities.

The issue faced by data centre partners including hyperscale and neocloud data centre operators, co-location providers, enterprise users, and technology providers is that siloed efforts produce competing design requirements that slows innovations and extends deployment timelines. To achieve economic efficiencies standardizations are needed to enable late-binding decisions, such as deploying GPUs or other AI accelerators within a given data centre facility.

This talk will discuss the latest open innovations being worked by the OCP Community on key data centre infrastructure challenges: power, cooling, mechanical, and management telemetry.