• Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research, Uptime Institute
• Chris Brown, Chief Technical Officer, Uptime Institute
• Jay Dietrich, Research Director, Sustainability, Uptime Institute

Uptime Institute presents the popular Panorama session, where the panelists and delegates discuss trends, events, and outages affecting the digital infrastructure industry.

Panel Moderator: Chris Brown, Chief Technical Officer, Uptime Institute

By 2030, facilities will need to be more adaptable, autonomous, and resilient than ever before. This discussion dives into the key design and construction shifts necessary to meet these challenges—from modular scalability, to AI-workload densification, to climate risk mitigation and supply chain resilience.

Panel Moderator: Daniel Bizo, Senior Research Analyst, Uptime Intelligence

As power demands rise and space constraints tighten, data centers will likely be forced to bring medium voltage equipment closer to the white space—or even onto the data center floor itself. In this session, a panel of technical engineering experts from leading vendors—who typically don’t have direct access to our events—will share their perspectives via live video interview. We will guide the discussion, while members can submit questions in advance or live during the session.

Moderator: Matt Stansberry, Executive Director Data Center Practitioner Insight and Experience, Uptime Institute

Historically equipment lifecycle planning involved tracking the normal wear and tear on the infrastructure against assumptions on the Expected Useful Life (EUL) of the equipment. Now organizations are facing rapid technological changes and early obsolescence at a component level that disrupt conventional planning processes.

Moderator: Jacqueline Davis, Research Analyst, Uptime Intelligence

Liquid cooling commissioning is one of today's most daunting data center facilities challenges as organizations begin deploying these next-generation systems. Many organizations struggle to employ the rigorous testing practices required to ensure systems function as designed.

Presenter: Max Smolaks, Research Analyst, Uptime Intelligence

AI is not a single, uniform workload. The infrastructure needs of a model depend on its application, the stage of the model's lifecycle, performance levels required, and other factors. Delivering AI at scale will require a variety of hardware platforms and architectures. In this session, we will look at the state of the AI accelerator market in 2025, and observe the different directions taken by hardware designers.

Presenter: Owen Rogers, Senior Research Director, Uptime Intelligence

As AI adoption accelerates, organizations face critical decisions about where to train and deploy their models.

• Should you leverage the flexibility of the cloud or invest in dedicated infrastructure for long-term cost efficiency and business value?
• How are AI models trained and then used in production?
• How does utilization affect the TCO of cloud vs dedicated infrastructure?
• How do diminishing returns impact the merits of different approaches?

Presenter: Jay Dietrich, Research Director, Sustainability, Uptime Institute

This panel discussion will focus on the opportunities for enterprise operators to improve the efficiency of their IT infrastructure, and for colocation operators to work with their IT tenants and customers to drive IT efficiency. The result is improved overall IT efficiency for the tenants and business opportunities for the colocation operators.

Moderator: Nick Archer, Regional Technical Director, Europe & UK, Uptime Institute

An outage is never just about the moment it happens—what comes next is just as critical. A well-executed post-outage response can mean the difference between a full recovery and lingering risks. This panel will dive into the essential policies, best practices, and real-world lessons learned from handling outages. Topics include structured post-mortems, incident documentation, stakeholder communication, compliance considerations, and how to turn failures into future resilience.

Moderator: John O’Brien, Senior Research Analyst, Uptime Institute

In an era where cyber threats, physical security risks, and operational vulnerabilities are on the rise, data center security is no longer just the domain of IT or security teams—it’s a critical responsibility for every data center manager. This session will challenge the common mindset of “it’s not my job” by demonstrating how overlooking security can lead to catastrophic outcomes, including downtime, data breaches, and financial losses.

The Uptime Network is built on shared experience. What kinds of information from your peers would help you the most? What topics are on the schedule for the rest of the year and which topics should be prioritized? How should we package and deliver Network readouts for maximum usefulness with minimal risk to those sharing information with the group? Your input will help shape how we evolve and strengthen the ways we learn from each other.

Moderator: Scott Killian, VP Global Uptime Network Membership Services

An open forum for attendees to engage with experts and peers on pressing issues in the data center industry. Participants are encouraged to share insights, pose questions, and discuss innovative solutions in a collaborative learning environment.