A New Era of Data Center Development Is Like a Second Industrial Revolution

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14032026/data-center-development-energy/

Publish Date: 2026-03-14 04:50:00

For its first three decades, the data center industry was not used to the limelight, quietly building server closets in office basements and later the infrastructure to power credit cards, digital health records, social media and streaming services.

But in the last few years, the industry has begun powering an explosive new technology—AI—which has changed everything, requiring vastly more energy, upgraded regulations for grid access and cost allocation and new local laws in response to growing community opposition.

The race among Big Tech companies to develop the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems has launched what Ning Lin, chief economist at the Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas at Austin, called a new era of data centers during a conference last week about powering artificial intelligence at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

The once discreet sector now requires enormous hyperscale warehouses across sprawling campuses running off a gigwatt of electricity that have become almost synonymous to the public with the race for AI dominance.

Andrew Schaap, CEO of Aligned Data Centers, a major Dallas-based data center developer, said the scale to which the capital, expertise, infrastructure and cloud services has evolved should be likened to a historical moment less like that of the early 2000s dot-com boom and more like the Industrial Revolution.

“It’s really the closest analogy, ” Schaap said at the Federal Reserve Bank conference. “Changing how we do things, what we’re doing.”

Aligned Data Centers owns more than 60 data center campuses. Some of the company’s smallest construction projects cost $500 million, Schaap said, with the largest in excess of $10 billion dollars.

Schaap said the speed requirements being asked of major data center developers today have dramatically changed the way the market is being served.

Within 90 days of delivering the completed…

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