The Wild West Data Center Industry Needs Standards

Oracle's recent pivot at Project Jupiter — swapping a natural gas plant for Bloom Energy fuel cells under pressure from regulators, federal agencies, and thousands of public commenters — drew a lot of headlines about community opposition to data centers. What got less attention was the engineering reality underneath it: a developer making a major on-site generation decision in real time, under duress, without a settled industry framework for evaluating it.

That's the data center market right now. Everyone is moving fast, everyone is improvising, and the consequences of getting it wrong are growing alongside the facilities themselves.

I spend a lot of time at conferences talking to hyperscalers and other data center developers about this. The conversation has a familiar shape. Data center developers know they need to move quickly — interconnection queues are years long and growing, compute demand isn't slowing, and the competitive pressure to get facilities online is relentless. What they are less certain about is whether the design decisions they're making today will hold up tomorrow.

The result is compounding uncertainty. Electrical manufacturers — the companies producing the transformers, switchgear, wire and cable, energy storage systems, fire suppression systems, and other electrical equipment that comprise more than 30% of the cost of a typical AI data center – are seeing their products deployed in environments that weren’t contemplated when many of the relevant, applicable codes were written.

Hanging in the balance are personnel safety, operational reliability and resilience – even grid reliability – as the needs of data centers evolve faster than the codes and standards written to govern them.

Indeed, what’s missing is a common framework, or rather, a shared technical reference that reflects where the market actually is and gives designers, developers, and operators a vendor-informed starting point.

Addressing this need – closing this gap – is precisely why the Data Center Design Considerations from the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) were developed. Rather than leaving developers and their design teams to navigate these challenges independently, NEMA has produced component-level guidance that walks practitioners through the specific performance criteria, safety considerations, and design decisions relevant to today's data center environment — covering energy storage systems and microgrids, fire and life safety, transformers, switchgear, uninterruptible power supplies, and more.

The goal is to provide engineers with the latest information that only the electrical manufacturing industry can provide.

Today, that guidance is now embedded in something larger: the AI Data Center Energy Performance Framework, developed jointly by NEMA, ASHRAE, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The Framework represents the most comprehensive integration of data center design, construction, and operational guidance available anywhere.

The Framework covers planning and siting, integrated design principles, energy and thermal efficiency, grid-interactive design, resilient design, commissioning, operations and maintenance, and retrofit strategies — all in a single, living resource that will be updated as technologies, grid conditions, and best practices evolve. PNNL's involvement means the energy systems analysis is grounded in federal research-grade rigor. ASHRAE's contributions bring decades of thermal management and HVAC expertise directly into the data center context. NEMA provides the electrical manufacturing perspective that connects standards to the equipment actually being installed.

The practical upside is clear. When an industry works from shared frameworks as opposed to proprietary ones, the whole development process gets faster and cheaper. Engineering review cycles shorten. Permitting conversations are supported with a common vocabulary. And costly, potentially dangerous misapplications of electrical and thermal management equipment get caught earlier.

The data center buildout isn’t slowing down. In 2025, NEMA released an analysis finding that data center electricity use would comprise 32% of the U.S. economy’s net electricity consumption growth by 2037. Upon revisiting the study in 2026, NEMA upwardly revised that figure to 38% — with data center electricity consumption expected to increase as much as 300% during that period.

As Data Center Frontier readers know well, this industry talks a lot about "speed to power." For developers of era-defining, economy-driving infrastructure, it’s the natural priority. But speed without a shared technical foundation is risk masquerading as efficiency – or rather, deferred cost associated with retrofits, safety incidents, and even community pushback. 

The Framework exists to help developers avert that risk and ensure that infrastructure is deployed in a way that keeps facilities safe, reliable, and actually beneficial to the grid.