Data Centre Alliance Transformation 2026: Scaling Sustainable and Resilient Digital Infrastructure

Overcoming the Four P’s

A major theme of the conference was navigating the complex barriers to data centre expansion.

Venessa Moffat, Managing Director of The DCA, opened the event with a session on “Overcoming The Four P’s”, identifying these as Politics, Planning, Power and Perceptions.

The discussion linked these challenges directly to the sector’s “Social Licence to Operate”, highlighting that public trust is built over time and requires moving beyond simple information sharing towards more collaborative engagement and the co-design of local benefits.

The scaling of AI added another layer of complexity, with discussions touching on the industry’s five walls of scaling, memory, power, sustainability and cost.

Together, these themes highlighted that future data centre growth will depend not only on technical capacity, but also on how well the sector responds to planning constraints, power demand, public expectations and local community needs.

ICT Sustainability and Circular Supply Chains

During the ICT Sustainability Workshop, moderated by Phil Beale, the focus shifted towards actionable environmental strategies.

The workshop explored the need to scale circular solutions, measure the triple bottom line, and integrate more sustainable data centre models from a cradle-to-cradle perspective.

A Dutch Government case study presented by Rich Kenny explored a performance-based EU Code of Conduct approach, including different server efficiency measures. The discussion also considered how an A-F life-extension grading system could help create a clearer business proposition for investment in circular solutions.

Supply chain challenges were another key topic, including fragmented investment decisions, premature replacement of infrastructure and uncertainty around future material requirements as distributed AI compute develops.

The discussion highlighted opportunities around interoperability, reducing engineered obsolescence and aligning data centre infrastructure with long-term decarbonisation technologies.

Digital Heat into Community Assets

The event also explored how data centres could contribute value beyond compute through a fireside chat on “Digital Heat into Community Assets”.

Examples including Village HeatShare and the Heat Oller Project demonstrated how recovered heat could be connected into local systems and used as a low-carbon community resource.

The discussion also highlighted the importance of co-design and early engagement when integrating digital infrastructure with surrounding communities.

The Cooling Dilemma

The conference closed with an expert panel titled “The Cooling Dilemma: Navigating Cooling Choices in the Age of AI”, featuring Dr Jon Summers, Research Lead at RISE.

The panel explored how operators can plan for uncertain future workloads while navigating increasingly demanding cooling requirements.

Different approaches, including direct liquid cooling and immersion cooling, were discussed not only in terms of energy efficiency, but also their potential to support greater levels of heat recovery and integration with wider energy systems.

As AI workloads push the sector against tighter power and sustainability constraints, decisions around thermal management will play an increasingly important role in the efficiency and resilience of future infrastructure.

Looking Ahead

DCA Transformation 2026 highlighted the need to think about data centre growth as a wider systems challenge.

Future progress will depend on connecting planning, power, public trust, circular supply chains, life extension, cooling, heat recovery and decarbonisation rather than addressing these issues in isolation.

For DICE Network+, these conversations connect closely with our ongoing work on data centre circularity and resilient digital infrastructure.

The event provided further insight into how the sector can better measure, manage and scale digital infrastructure responsibly, while retaining more value from assets, reducing supply chain impacts and creating stronger links between data centres and the communities they serve.