Data Center Summit: Powering the Digital Ecosystem

Data centers have become consequential infrastructure shaping the digital economy.

As demand for computing accelerates, innovation in power, design, construction, and computing is increasingly critical to improving efficiency, sustainability, and global competitiveness at scale.

Join us this May as Virginia Tech brings together leaders from industry, academia, and government for the Data Center Summit, a focused convening on the innovation and workforce needs shaping the data center ecosystem.

The summit will feature expert and emerging voices in candid conversation about the opportunities, tradeoffs, and decisions defining the future of data center infrastructure, grounded in real-world experience and cross-sector collaboration.

Summit objectives

By 2030, data center workloads are projected to quadruple, requiring new structures, policies, and workforces. Rather than a traditional conference agenda, the Data Center Summit is designed as a focused leadership conversation about the infrastructure powering the digital ecosystem.

Across plenary sessions, curated talks, and interactive discussion formats, the summit will surface the realities shaping data centers today, such as:

• The Power Solution: Capacity, reliability, and the energymix behind data at scale
• Building at Scale: How data centers are designed, built, and deployed from dirt to delivery>
• Inside the Machine: Computing, cloud, and the complex workloads running inside modern facilities
• Security and Resilience in Critical Digital Infrastructures: Cyber and physical threats, uptime and risk management, and the national and economic security considerations
• ...along with breakout sessions centered around efficiency, capital, AI-chips, and the development of infrastructure with the Coalition for Smart Construction

Why Virginia Tech?

Virginia Tech is at the epicenter of this global digital ecosystem. The Commonwealth has 600+ data centers as of mid-2025 and Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” alone handles more than 70 percent of worldwide internet traffic.

This concentration makes the region a real-world proving ground for the challenges and opportunities shaping data center infrastructure.

Backed by our geographic advantage, expertise, and existing partnerships, Virginia Tech is stepping in to help answer mission-critical questions for the booming digital ecosystem. Modeled after previous successful summits on artificial intelligence and semiconductor technologies, the Data Center Summit will create space for practical, cross-sector dialogue around the infrastructure powering the digital ecosystem.