Dell'Oro Group projects DCPI market to top $80 billion

Dell'Oro Group published a five‑year forecast examining the Data Center Physical Infrastructure market and found that constrained power availability limited near‑term capacity expansion, prompting operators to turn to on‑site generation for large Artificial Intelligence (AI) campuses.

The report said service providers, including cloud, colocation, and neocloud operators, would increase DCPI spending roughly five times faster than enterprise customers, reflecting greater complexity and capital intensity; it also linked grid interconnection delays and transmission bottlenecks to surging demand for natural gas turbines and reciprocating engines as operators sought to bring multi‑hundred‑megawatt and gigawatt‑scale campuses online.

Rising chip Thermal Design Power (TDP) and the approach of the one‑megawatt rack were identified as drivers of facility design changes. Thermal management was projected to grow at a 20 percent Compound Annual Growth rate (CAGR) and reach the value of the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) market by decade end. Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC) was forecast to exceed $8 billion by 2030, and the report cited NVIDIA's Vera Rubin compute tray designs that eliminate fans and enable fully liquid‑cooled configurations; cabinet power distribution units, overhead busway systems, and emerging Dual Connectivity (DC) power distribution architectures were expected to expand.

The Data Center Physical Infrastructure 5‑Year Forecast report provided market sizes and forecasts for uninterruptible power supplies, thermal management, cabinet power distribution and busway, rack power distribution, IT racks and containment, and software and services, and it allocated manufacturing revenues across cloud service providers, telco, colocation, and enterprise customer segments.

“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. Despite power constraints, operators are deploying creative mitigation strategies to bring capacity online, supporting our decision to revise the DCPI growth outlook upward for the 2025‑29 period.”

Dell'Oro Group projected the worldwide DCPI market would grow at a mid‑teens CAGR from 2025 to 2030 and surpass $80 billion.