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Data Center News
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Building the Grid of Tomorrow:
Digital Substations and Hybrid Power at Data Centers
As data centers scale to meet AI and cloud demand, onsite power generation is becoming a foundational part of long term energy planning. Across the country, operators and utilities are confronting the same challenge: accelerating load growth against interconnection timelines that often extend beyond business needs. This is driving a shift toward more localized, digitally coordinated power architectures.
Digital substations are emerging as a key enabler. Their ability to streamline protection, control, and real time visibility allows operators to integrate onsite generation with greater efficiency and responsiveness. Combined with modern, high efficiency distribution systems, data centers can manage hybrid power portfolios while reducing energy losses and improving operational agility.
This evolution is also reshaping utility relationships. With more intelligent substations and distribution networks, data centers can serve as flexible, grid supportive assets—helping manage peaks, improve stability, and enable phased power delivery. The industry is now aligned around a common goal: reliable, efficient, and future-ready power infrastructure.
Let’s work across the sector—operators, utilities, engineers, and technology partners—to align and co-develop the power infrastructure the future will demand.
At ABB, we’re excited to partner with you on this journey. We’re investing in our people, portfolio, and production to help build the world’s most advanced data centers—together.
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Past Issues
Q1 2026
Powering AI at Scale: A New Era for Data Centers
AI clusters are reshaping the data center landscape. With rack densities and energy demand reaching unprecedented levels, U.S. operators face increasing pressure to deliver more compute per square foot while meeting ambitious sustainability objectives. I anticipate steady progress this year as we move closer to solving these challenges.
Q4 2025
As AI Reshapes our Digital World, ABB Helps Data Centers Outrun
As data center operators, designers and infrastructure providers, we’re seeing seismic shifts – not just in what we build, but how we build. September and October brought many of us in the industry together and a consistent set of themes has emerged. In this note, I’d like to share what we’re seeing, what it means for architecture, and ABB is ready to partner with you in this new paradigm.
Q3 2025
Welcome Back, Amanda Trumble – Rejoining ABB to drive Data Center strategy in the U.S.
We are pleased to introduce Amanda Trumble as our new Data Center Segment Leader – bringing with her over 18 years of industry experience and strategic vision. Amanda brings a dynamic leadership style and a strong focus on customer success through her experience in data center account management. She returns to ABB from Hitachi Energy, where she led global teams and initiatives for a major hyperscale.
Q2 2025
AI-Ready Data Centers
Industry Update
AI factories are reshaping the way we design, build and operate traditional data centers. The advent of AI has started an industry frenzy of innovation, investment and speed to market. AI factories are driving the next industrial revolution. These specialized data centers utilize massive computational power to produce large amounts of intelligence, in the form of tokens. These tokens serve as a measure of value of AI intelligence generated within those factories.
Q1 2025
Powering Up Data Centers in 2025
Industry Update
As the digital landscape continues to expand, the data center industry is witnessing unprecedented growth. With this expansion comes great responsibility to the environment and surrounding communities to stay committed to our sustainability agendas.
Q4 2024
Sustainability Progress and Innovations
ABB's commitment towards decarbonizing digital infrastructure
As the digital landscape continues to expand, the data center industry is witnessing unprecedented growth. With this expansion comes great responsibility to the environment and surrounding communities to stay committed to our sustainability agendas.
Q3 2024
Powering Up with ABB
The Shift to Medium Voltage Solutions
With exponential growth of data generation and storage, data centers are scaling up rapidly and construction trends are emerging. Higher power densities are required to support AI data centers. An industry shift to medium voltage systems has been shown to provide higher efficiency, better scalability, and reduced infrastructure complexity. Another initiative in construction is the desire to replace diesel with energy storage systems.
Q2 2024
Industry Update
Harry Handlin, U.S. Data Center Segment Leader
The Spring 7x24 Exchange Conference in Orlando is just a few weeks away. We invite you to attend our moderated panel discussion, Elevating Efficiency: Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) design considerations for containerized applications. There are currently two major trends that impact the design of eHouses containing UPS modules.
Q1 2024
Industry Update
Harry Handlin, U.S. Data Center Segment Leader
The AI inflection point has shaped the trends of the 2024 data center landscape. In an era defined by digital transformation, we continue to see unprecedented data volumes forcing the industry to innovate and redefine design, construction, and operation of the traditional data center. The data center industry finds itself at another key inflection point.