willing to pay a premium for resilience and faster time to power, with new voluntary standards emerging to normalise designs.
In January 2026, National Electrical Manufacturers Association( NEMA) published Data Center Design Considerations for Energy Storage Systems( NEMA US 80074‐2025) and a companion guide on microgrid integration, providing blueprints for integrating BESS into campus power topologies while preserving safety, interoperability and grid-support capabilities. This is significant as it begins to move storage away from bespoke, proprietary schemes towards repeatable, standardsaligned reference architectures.
AI is acting as the accelerant. ZincFive’ s 2025 Data Center Energy Storage Industry Insights report shows 55 % of industry respondents citing higher energy efficiency requirements as AI’ s biggest impact on power and storage, with 54 % highlighting the need for higher power density and smaller footprints. Nearly 86 % expect a shift toward more customised power designs tailored to AI workloads. Those designs increasingly include denser, longer-duration and
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