Surging AI workloads, severe power constraints, and rising community opposition were the dominant themes at this month’s IMN Data Centers Power Capital event at the Union League Club in New York. There, data center owners, private equity firms, venture capitalists, lenders, and bankers explored trends in investment, financing, and risk mitigation.

According to Ropes & Gray, there was an apparent “increase in the sophistication of how market participants approach the full life cycle of data center positioning, financing, investment, construction, deployment, and exit.”

In its post-event blog, the firm emphasized that multi-tenant enterprise and wholesale deployments provide investors with a more diversified tenant pool and a quicker path to cash flow generation, especially when measured against hyperscaler concentration risk from long-term tenancy).

In commentary from other attendees after the gathering, there seemed to be a consensus that “demonstrated operating capability” would continue to be critical, with a huge demand for experienced teams with proven track records:

– managing infrastructure

– securing power

– and navigating local zoning amid growing community backlash.

Other discussions revolved around the site-specific realities of “Behind the Meter” power, the difference in site selection criteria for training vs. inferencing, power infrastructure financing, modern data center lease financing, and the challenges of securing local site prep approvals amid rising NIMBYism.

These are topics RCRTech will cover in upcoming days and weeks. Also stay tuned for RCRTV’s AI TechTalk, which this week will feature Jeane-Philippe Fricker, founder and Chief Systems Architect for Cerebras Systems, who discusses how to succeed with a novel idea, even when everyone around you thinks your crazy.

Dive into Google-Blackstone deal?: Will the massive $5B venture with Blackstone strengthen Google’s position against Nvidia-centric AI clouds like CoreWeave and Nebius, and will its TPUs mean better pricing for enterprise AI training &  inference?

Huawei’s AI DC strategy: During its Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum 2026, Huawei announced a new data center infrastructure portfolio, which will focus on storage, inference, and data management for enterprises and hyperscalers.

What parts of inference go where?: Listen to what Roy Chua of AvidThink says on the Pulse about the LLM era, and where to do operations (embeddings and filtering), prefill and re-ranking, as well as compute-driven heavy reasoning.