Buses will depart from the front of the hotel lobby for attendees that signed up for the tour. Security check- in will be conducted upon arrival at the site. Photo IDs are required for security check-in.

Tour attendees will meet for a working lunch to note best practices and opportunities for improvement observed during the data center tour.

In this AI Working Group session, senior IT leaders will engage in a candid, peer-driven discussion on the realities of AI implementation—balancing infrastructure demands, operational risks, and evolving regulatory landscapes. Building on insights from past sessions in Portland and Paris, this roundtable will explore practical strategies, roadblocks, and innovations shaping the AI-driven enterprise.

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.

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.

Uptime Network Conference Welcome and General announcements.

• 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.

Join us for an enjoyable networking opportunity with a reception and dinner at the hotel.

Panel Moderator: Ryan Orr, Global Head, Service Delivery, 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

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 to deploy these next-generation systems. But many organizations are struggling 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 particular model depend on its application, the stage of the model's lifecycle, the levels of performance required, and many 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

Rapidly accelerating data center growth has collided with limited available generation capacity in some regulated utility territories. This panel will discuss the constraints applied by regulatory processes public service and public utility commissions, concerns about cost shifting to residential and light commercial customers, strategies to navigate the process to capture new and available power for data center projects, and work being done under the electric power research institute’s (EPRIs) DCFlex initiative to accelerate the transformation of the electricity transmission and generation infrastructure.

Presenter: Rose Weinschenk, Research Analyst, Uptime Intelligence

This presentation examines the human elements of NIMBYism that owners and operators cannot fix with design alone. It provides actionable data on which strategies are effective and which to avoid when working with communities.

Moderator: Ron Davis, VP of Digital Infrastructure Operations, 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.

Presenter: Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research, 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.

Presenter: 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.