The Data Center Frontier Show

Ahead of SC26 in Chicago, Data Center Frontier contributing editor Doug Black welcomes Lois McKinnis of Argonne National Laboratory, Addison Snell of Intersect 360 Research, and Earl Joseph of Hyperion Research for a preview of the year's biggest supercomputing themes.

The conversation explores accelerating AI-HPC convergence, the DOE's Genesis Mission, quantum computing, and emerging technologies including photonics and advanced cooling. The panel also tackles rising system costs, shortening GPU refresh cycles, and the growing challenge of communicating data center infrastructure's value to the public.

A timely, 32-minute look at the technologies, economics, and industry questions shaping SC26.

The data center construction industry continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace. As artificial intelligence accelerates demand for computing capacity, data center developers, owners, general contractors, and equipment suppliers face growing pressure to deliver projects faster, manage increasingly complex supply chains, and navigate a rapidly changing market. Understanding these challenges—and how industry professionals are responding to them—is essential to building the infrastructure that powers our digital world.

In this episode, BluePrint Supply Chain takes a closer look at its third annual State of the Industry Report on the Data Center Construction Supply Chain, examining what industry professionals are saying about the challenges, priorities, and opportunities shaping mission-critical construction.

Joining the conversation is Bill Tierney, Chief Sales Officer for BluePrint Supply Chain, who will discuss the report’s findings and explore what they reveal about the current state and future direction of the data center construction supply chain.

The third year of the report marks an important milestone. While individual annual surveys provide a valuable snapshot of industry sentiment, three years of responses begin to reveal something more meaningful: emerging patterns, shifting priorities, and longer-term trends. By comparing responses across reporting periods and examining them against broader market forces, BluePrint can begin to distinguish temporary challenges from persistent industry issues—and identify where expectations, behaviors, and supply chain strategies are changing.

Whether you are a data center owner, developer, general contractor, procurement leader, equipment supplier, or logistics professional, this episode offers an opportunity to gain perspective on the forces shaping mission-critical construction—and what the industry's collective experience can teach us about building smarter, more resilient supply chains.

Alberta's data center industry has moved from ambition to execution. But what does it take to turn a relatively small regional market into a gigawatt-scale digital infrastructure hub?

In this episode of the Data Center Frontier Show, Editor in Chief Matt Vincent welcomes Vlad Oujegov, president and founder of the Western Canada Data Centre Alliance, founder of Data Centre West, and National Data Center Power Systems Lead at Schneider Electric.

Fresh from Data Centre West 2026 in Calgary, the conversation examines Alberta's remarkable transformation, including Meta's CAD $13 billion, 1-GW data center development in Sturgeon County, and the industrial, workforce and community challenges accompanying the province's emerging AI infrastructure economy.

Oujegov offers an especially revealing perspective on the industry's growing self-awareness. Across discussions of power, cooling, technology and policy, operators and suppliers are increasingly emphasizing voluntary commitments to environmental performance, efficiency and community benefits. Yet that progress is occurring alongside intensified public scrutiny and opposition to new data center development.

The discussion also explores the overlooked challenges of expanding a regional industry tenfold, from skilled labor and commissioning capacity to the local warehouses, service networks and supply chains required to support hyperscale infrastructure.

Vincent and Oujegov examine why credible megawatts increasingly matter more than ambitious announcements, how unrealistic proposals can undermine legitimate developments, and whether data centers should face regulatory requirements beyond those applied to other large industrial facilities.

Drawing on lessons from Northern Virginia's Data Center Alley and Alberta's own community engagement efforts, the episode considers a larger question: Can the data center industry build the physical infrastructure of AI while earning the public trust necessary to sustain its expansion?

As Alberta begins turning gigawatt-scale plans into construction activity, this conversation offers a timely examination of what it really means to build not just data centers, but an entire data center industry.

Read more: DCF's in-depth coverage of Data Centre West 2026.

The data center industry's race for power is accelerating, but what if some of the capacity needed to support AI growth is already available inside existing facilities?

In this episode of the Data Center Frontier Show, DCF Editor-in-Chief Matt Vincent speaks with Rahul Kar, founder and CEO of Hammerhead AI, about the company's approach to unlocking underutilized electrical capacity through AI-driven orchestration.

Kar explains how Hammerhead's ORCA platform uses reinforcement learning to coordinate power, cooling, and compute workloads, allowing operators to accommodate additional GPU capacity within existing electrical limits. The conversation explores the distinction between unused power and safely recoverable capacity, including the operational safeguards necessary to protect existing customer service-level agreements.

The discussion also examines why latency-tolerant AI inference workloads may be particularly suited to flexible power management, and how greater infrastructure utilization could reshape the economics of colocation, GPU deployment, and AI cloud services.

Key topics include:

Why the AI power crisis is partly an infrastructure utilization problem.

How ORCA integrates facility power systems, cooling infrastructure, and GPU-level controls.

The performance trade-offs involved in accommodating additional inference workloads.

Hammerhead's reported 30% increase in GPU capacity within a fixed power envelope.

The commercial value of recovering usable megawatts without waiting for new utility interconnections.

Hammerhead's production deployments, industry collaborations, and expansion plans for 2027.

Kar also considers how more intelligent infrastructure management could complement new power generation and data center construction as AI demand continues to accelerate.

Listen to the full conversation for a closer look at how software-defined orchestration could help the industry produce more AI compute from the power it already has.

As AI workloads continue to drive growing demand for data center power, operators are considering how new intelligence can help operators make better use of complex infrastructure. In this conversation, Matt Vincent, Editor in Chief of Data Center Frontier, sits down with Sadiq Syed, SVP Digital Energy Software at Schneider Electric to explore how EcoStruxure Foresight, Schneider Electric’s AI-powered operations platform for the built environment, is helping bring energy, power and building management together, and why the future of AI will depend on unlocking both energy and intelligence. 

The discussion explores how AI-powered insights and intelligent infrastructure management can help operators improve visibility, efficiency and resilience, while breaking down the separation between building, facility and energy systems. Sadiq will also discuss why connecting these traditionally separate domains will be increasingly important as data centers scale for AI, enabling a more unified and intelligent approach to managing critical infrastructure.