Technology

How AI Is Turning Data Centres Into Active Energy Infrastructure

Published

1 month ago

September 26, 2026

As AI workloads drive unprecedented demand for compute, the role of the data centre is expanding beyond processing and storage — towards grid interaction, heat reuse and new ways of measuring infrastructure efficiency.

Data centres have traditionally been viewed as large consumers of electricity: facilities designed to provide the power, cooling and connectivity required to keep digital services running. But the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is beginning to challenge that relatively simple relationship.

As compute requirements rise, operators are being pushed to think not only about how much energy a facility consumes, but how that infrastructure interacts with electricity grids, renewable generation and surrounding communities. Battery storage, heat reuse and more sophisticated energy management are increasingly becoming part of the discussion, while conventional measures of data-centre efficiency are also being reassessed for an AI-driven era.

The shift raises a broader question for the industry: could the data centre evolve from being primarily a power consumer into an active component of the energy system?

That was one of the central themes emerging from the European Data Centre Associations Summit, hosted by Vertiv in Zagreb, where representatives from data-centre associations across Sweden, the Netherlands, France and Ireland discussed the infrastructure supporting Europe’s digital economy. The conversation began with a reminder of how invisible data centres remain to most users. Consumers may interact with data centre infrastructure dozens of times every day, through banking, digital payments, video calls, cloud applications and government services, without ever thinking about the physical systems behind those services.

But AI is making that infrastructure increasingly difficult to ignore. From grid burden to grid participant As data centre demand expands, access to electricity has become one of the sector’s biggest constraints. Yet the panel argued that data centres should not necessarily be viewed purely as an additional burden on already stretched electricity networks.

Stijn Grove, Managing Director of the Dutch Data Center Association, pointed to the potential for data centres to locate closer to renewable-energy generation and absorb power that might otherwise require significant additional transmission infrastructure. He also highlighted a broader opportunity: data centres could potentially help stabilise grids as renewable generation becomes more variable.

That idea was echoed by Ronan Kelly, CEO of Digital Infrastructure Ireland, who discussed the role of battery energy-storage systems and on-site backup capacity in supporting electricity networks during periods of peak demand. The direction of travel is significant. Data centres are beginning to move from simply asking “How much power can the grid give us?” towards asking “How can our infrastructure interact with the grid?” Waste heat becomes an asset The panel also highlighted heat reuse as one of the clearest examples of how data centres can integrate more deeply into local communities.

Isabelle Kemlin, Vice Chair of the Board at Swedish Datacenter Industry, cited examples where waste heat from data centers is being reused through district-heating systems and even agricultural applications. In the Netherlands, Grove pointed to projects where data-centre heat is being used to replace natural gas in buildings and potentially support greenhouse operations.

Such projects challenge the perception of data centres as isolated industrial buildings that simply consume electricity and generate heat. Increasingly, the heat itself can become part of another energy system. AI changes the efficiency conversation AI is also forcing the industry to reconsider how data center efficiency should be measured. Traditional measures such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) remain important, but several speakers argued that they do not always capture the complete picture.

For example, equipment installed to recover and redistribute waste heat may consume additional electricity and therefore worsen a facility’s PUE, even though the overall energy system becomes more efficient. The discussion therefore moved towards a newer metric increasingly associated with AI infrastructure: tokens per watt. Instead of measuring only how efficiently a facility delivers electricity to IT equipment, tokens per watt attempts to connect energy consumption with the amount of useful AI computation produced.

As AI factories become larger and more power-intensive, the ability to convert electricity into useful compute efficiently may become as important as simply minimising facility overhead. Europe’s sovereignty challenge Energy is not the only reason Europe will continue to require significant local data center capacity. The panel also highlighted digital sovereignty. Europe’s fragmented national landscape means governments, public-sector organizations, and regulated industries frequently need to consider where data is stored and processed. Moving workloads across borders may be technically possible, but sovereignty, security, and latency requirements can make local infrastructure essential. That creates a very different environment from markets where computing resources can be concentrated across a smaller number of enormous geographic regions. The public-perception problem

Perhaps the industry’s biggest challenge, however, is not technical. Several panellists acknowledged that public perceptions of data centers remain dominated by concerns around electricity consumption, water usage, land requirements and limited employment creation.

Michaël Reffay, Managing Director of France Data center, argued that many of these criticisms overlook the wider economic and digital services supported by data center infrastructure.

Kelly made a similar point, arguing that discussions about data centre carbon emissions frequently focus only on the electricity consumed by facilities while ignoring emissions potentially avoided through digital services such as remote working, digital banking and electronic distribution.

The industry therefore faces a communication challenge alongside its engineering one. Data centers will consume significant amounts of energy as AI expands. But the sector increasingly wants policymakers and the public to judge that consumption alongside the digital services, economic activity, renewable-energy investment, and wider infrastructure benefits it enables.

AI makes infrastructure strategic Perhaps the clearest conclusion from the discussion was that digital infrastructure is no longer simply a back-end utility. AI is making access to power, cooling, grids and computing capacity strategic economic issues. For Europe, the next phase of the data centre debate may therefore be less about whether more facilities should be built and more about where they are built, how they interact with energy systems, and how effectively the industry can demonstrate their value to society.

Tech News

Cambridge Health Group and Heriot-Watt University to advance research and innovation in the GCC

Published

1 day ago

November 6, 2026

Integrator Web-Editor

Cambridge Health Group (“CHG an international specialist healthcare group providing post-acute care and a subsidiary of Amanat Holdings PJSC (“Amanat”), has signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Heriot-Watt University (“Heriot-Watt”) to advance academic research in rehabilitation, long-term care and specialised care.

The agreement brings together CHG’s clinical expertise in long-term care and post-acute rehabilitation across six facilities in the UAE and Saudi Arabia with Heriot-Watt University’s pioneering research in healthy ageing, rehabilitation robotics and assistive technologies. Through its Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies and the National Robotarium, Heriot-Watt combines expertise in engineering, artificial intelligence and behavioural science to address complex challenges in health and care. Heriot-Watt’s global presence spans five campuses across Scotland, Dubai and Malaysia, with plans to establish a further campus in Saudi Arabia.

Together, the organisations will connect research with clinical practice, creating opportunities to develop and evaluate innovations that support rehabilitation, maximise independence and improve quality of life for people with complex, long-term care needs. The partners will also pursue national and international research grants, including collaboration with government and industry partners.

The partnership will also support the development of the region’s specialist healthcare workforce through academic training, executive education and tailored development programmes. These will include postgraduate research supervision, internships, industry placements and mentoring, helping connect academic learning with practical experience.

Professor Dame Heather McGregor, member of Heriot-Watt University’s Executive, said: “Universities have an important role in ensuring that research responds to the needs of society and that its benefits extend beyond academia. Our partnership with Cambridge Health Group brings our researchers closer to the questions and challenges shaping healthcare practice, creating opportunities to translate knowledge into meaningful improvements in care. Through education, professional development and practical experience, we look forward to supporting the skills and expertise the region will need as its healthcare sector continues to evolve. We look forward to doing meaningful work together.”

Wael K. Abdallah, Group Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge Health Group, said: “As healthcare systems across the region evolve, advancing specialised care will increasingly depend on our ability to connect research, clinical expertise and real-world healthcare needs. At Cambridge Health Group, we see research and innovation as important enablers of better care outcomes and the continued development of post-acute healthcare across the GCC. Our collaboration with Heriot-Watt creates opportunities to bring academic expertise closer to clinical practice, strengthen the capabilities of our workforce and contribute to the long-term advancement of the sector.”

The partnership represents a step towards translating research into practical advances in specialised care, with the potential to benefit patients, healthcare professionals and the wider sector.

Tech News

Leading AI Builders Make Massive Commitments on VAST-Powered Infrastructure

Published

1 day ago

November 6, 2026

Integrator Web-Editor

On the back of the biggest buildout in data infrastructure history, VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, today announced that it is at the center of many of the largest deployments in this space. In the first three quarters of the current fiscal year, just 14 of the more than 1,000 companies VAST serves have made more than $10 billion in aggregate commitments for VAST Data software and supporting platform hardware. The scale and breadth of these investments have no known precedent in the history of data infrastructure and signal that VAST is leading the world in this explosive buildout of superintelligent systems.

The VAST AI OS is the platform of choice for leading AI clouds and frontier AI labs to enable scalable AI training and inference. In 2026, the expansion of AI use cases and the realization of the value of superintelligent systems has reinforced the mandate for organizations to build with industrial-grade storage and database infrastructure to support GPUs and AI accelerators.

The progress VAST has made:

14 customers have each committed over $100M in VAST Data-powered system build outs
Four of those 14 customers have each committed over $1B this year
VAST Data-powered systems now support 9 of the top 10 frontier AI labs

“Growth at this scale only happens when an entire industry is rebuilding at once,” said Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO of VAST Data. “That’s what the new AI stack is. It’s being built for models and agents, not people and applications, and data sits at the center of it. The companies building it at the largest scale, for people, agents and now robots, are choosing VAST to anchor it.”

Supply Aligned Through 2029

The scale of data capacity VAST’s partners are delivering is unprecedented, and is now representing a significant percentage of the overall global NAND flash produced for enterprise data centers. At a time of such extreme supply chain pressure, VAST is also now taking steps to ensure the next phase of superintelligent system buildout. Increased flash supply takes years to bring online due to the investments in NAND fabs.

Because VAST is partnered with so many of the world’s AI builders, VAST has unique visibility into where capacity demand is headed. The company has structured agreements with its supply chain partners to align more than 200 exabytes of flash capacity through 2029. This forward planning supports VAST’s scaling objectives for the next several years, maps to the growth outlook of its largest customers and helps the AI clouds, labs, enterprises and government organizations building on the VAST AI OS plan their infrastructure with confidence.

“Planning for hundreds of exabytes isn’t only about protecting our customers’ growth projections,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder of VAST Data. “It’s about keeping flash available to hundreds of clouds, so that every AI builder, not just the largest, has the capacity it needs to build and compete.”

Tech News

Cloudera to Tackle the Enterprise AI Governance Gap at GITEX Global 2026

Published

2 days ago

November 5, 2026

Integrator Web-Editor

Cloudera, the only data and AI platform trusted by organisations to bring AI to their data, announced its participation at GITEX Global 2026, the Middle East’s premier technology showcase.

As AI adoption accelerates across the Middle East, businesses must ensure their data is accessible, well governed, and secure to support AI advancements. Organizations who handle sensitive data carefully consider where AI workloads run and how data is managed across their public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments.

The UAE’s focus on sovereign AI and a secure digital environment is driven by nationwide digital-first initiatives. The UAE’s cloud computing market is projected to reach $23 billion by 2032, due to numerous government mandates for sovereign cloud adoption across the public sector.

Alongside these mandates, enterprises within the region are adopting similar sovereignty principles. Organizations are looking to transition their AI workloads from public clouds to private or on-premises environments. However, this migration exposes a critical infrastructure challenge as legacy systems often confine valuable information in isolated data silos.

The impact of these silos is evident in Cloudera’s recent Data Readiness Index, which reveals that while 91% of IT leaders across EMEA express confidence in their data, only 26% report that it is fully governed. To dismantle these barriers and bridge the gap between AI and data readiness, Cloudera introduces Cloudera Anywhere Cloud, a modular hybrid platform engineered specifically for the agentic era.

“Our participation at GITEX Global 2026 comes at a time when organisations are looking more closely at how they manage data and deploy AI,” said Ahmad Shakora, Group Vice President, Cloudera Middle East. “Our work with global technology providers and regional partners reflects the different requirements businesses face, from accessing AI models to managing data across hybrid and sovereign environments.”

To further strengthen its regional ecosystem, Cloudera has forged strategic alliances, including Mistral AI, to assist Cloudera with delivering the hybrid data foundation essential for moving enterprise AI into more organisations. Supported by Cloudera’s Anywhere Cloud platform, this new offering by Cloudera helps equip organizations in the Middle East with a secure, localized platform needed to scale advanced AI securely and independently.

Based on stand H15-E40, Hall No. S15, Cloudera will feature live demonstrations showing how enterprises can tackle persistent data governance and architectural challenges to allow organisations to utilise AI securely within their own organisations.