The global Data Center Physical Infrastructure (DCPI) market is on track to surpass $80 billion by 2030, growing at a mid-teens CAGR from 2025 to 2030, according to a new forecast from Dell’Oro Group. Power availability has emerged as the primary constraint on near-term expansion, pushing operators to adopt on-site generation as a practical requirement rather than a contingency, particularly for large AI campuses measured in hundreds of megawatts or more.
Dell’Oro Group reports that rising chip thermal design power and the approach of the one-megawatt rack are driving fundamental changes across data center architecture. These shifts span power delivery, cooling, and physical layout, prompting operators to re-evaluate long-standing design assumptions as they scale AI-focused facilities. Despite grid interconnection delays and transmission bottlenecks, the firm revised its DCPI growth outlook upward for the 2025–2029 period, citing strong demand signals and accelerated deployment strategies.
Cooling and power distribution are among the fastest-growing segments. Thermal management is projected to expand at a 20% CAGR, while direct liquid cooling is forecast to exceed $8 billion by 2030, supported by designs such as NVIDIA’s latest compute trays that eliminate fans and enable fully liquid-cooled configurations. Spending growth from cloud, colocation, and neocloud operators is expected to run roughly five times faster than enterprise, reflecting the increasing capital intensity of AI-ready infrastructure.
- DCPI market forecast to surpass $80 billion by 2030, with mid-teens CAGR from 2025–2030
- Thermal management projected to grow ~20% CAGR and approach UPS market value by decade’s end
- Direct liquid cooling expected to exceed $8 billion by 2030 as AI factory designs scale
- Cabinet PDU and busway adoption accelerates, with overhead busway becoming standard for slab-based AI facilities
- Power constraints drive increased deployment of on-site natural gas turbines and reciprocating engines for multi-hundred-MW and gigawatt-scale campuses
“The DCPI market is undergoing a period of profound structural transformation,” said Alex Cordovil, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Technology disruption is cascading across the stack as rising chip thermal design power and the approach of the one-megawatt rack force fundamental changes in facility design.”
