Key takeaways from the 2026 Virginia Tech Data Center Summit covering the massive power demands driven by AI workloads, construction and deployment challenges, and emerging efficiency metrics. Northern Virginia hosts 13% of global data center capacity, with Dominion Energy managing 48.5 GW of contracted data center capacity in its pipeline. GPU-driven AI workloads have pushed rack power draw from ~3 kW to 50+ kW, with NVIDIA exploring 800V DC architecture to support 1 MW racks by 2027. Construction bottlenecks center on power availability and labor efficiency, with modularization and offsite prefabrication as key strategies. Virginia's new GS-5 rate class ensures large data center operators bear infrastructure costs rather than residential ratepayers. Emerging AI workload types — training, inference, and agentic — each present distinct engineering challenges, and 'tokens per watt-hour' is gaining traction as a more meaningful efficiency metric than traditional PUE.
