Realizing the Open Data Center Ecosystem Vision

OCP Launches New "Open Data Center for AI" Strategic Initiative

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP), the nonprofit international organization bringing at-scale innovations and hyperscale best practices to all, announces an expansion to its Open Systems for AI, an umbrella initiative with the new Open Data Center for AI Strategic Initiative (SI), to increase efforts on key data center infrastructure challenges: power, cooling, mechanical, and management telemetry. The addition of this new strategic initiative is in response to a large increase in data center physical infrastructure projects and workstreams launched in the past year, learnings from the OCP Open Systems for AI SI workshop series, and the new open-letter call for collaboration. With strong support from the OCP Board and stakeholders, the Foundation invites other organizations to sign this letter, which was initiated by Google, Meta, and Microsoft.. This underscores the OCP Foundation's mission to support the entire open data center ecosystem, covering IT as well as physical data center infrastructure and facilities.

The mandate of the Open Data Center for AI SI is to develop standardizations for data center infrastructure allowing advanced high-density AI infrastructure to be deployed as flexibly as traditional compute where facilities are built with a common understanding of management telemetry, advanced power and cooling technologies to enable simpler deployment of a wide variety of AI solutions. The issue faced by data center partners including hyperscalers, neoclouds, co-location providers, enterprise users, and technology providers is that siloed efforts produce competing design requirements that slows innovations and extends deployment timelines. The goal is to identify and specify requirements for AI data centers such that the physical infrastructure common ground enables fungibility for a diverse AI IT infrastructure, especially while aspects of the AI IT elements are rapidly evolving. This will enable colocation data center providers to support a wider range of tenants with fewer customizations.