IDCA Releases Infinity Paradigm AE360® 2.0 Data Center Standards Framework - Addressing the Age AI and AI Factories

Washington, DC – April 7, 2026 – The International Data Center Authority (IDCA) announces that version 2.0 of the Infinity Paradigm®️ AE360®️ Standards Framework has been released. In addressing the requirements of artificial intelligence, AI factories, cybersecurity, and more, the Infinity Paradigm AE360®️ maintains the holistic digital infrastructure and application-centric ecosystem optimization and risk elimination standards framework.

AE360®️ 2.0 is the all-in-one holistic global standards framework that presents an all-inclusive approach to assessing the infrastructure and operational risk and performance of an application ecosystem, inclusive of data center, cloud infrastructure, computing and application gear, and their management. This standards framework can be applied to individual or multiple data centers supporting one or more application ecosystems.

Mehdi Paryavi, Chairman and CEO of the International Data Center Authority (IDCA), stated that “Infinity Paradigm®️ is the paradigm shift that our industry needed that offers the dynamic and interwoven spectrum of efficacies that remains relevant in addressing the global evolution of AI and digitization in terms of standardization and conformance to principles that will warrant the reliability of our digital economies.”

The AE360®️ 2.0 Standards Framework is developed to address the growing need for standardized best practices in an evolving and expansive world of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Today, data centers are fundamental to the global prosperity digital economy as their capabilities, resilience, and capacities support the sovereignty and expandability of the global economy. Data centers have become an essential infrastructure in the modern era, where their limitations or failure to deliver as intended could serve as global bottlenecks.

Paryavi adds, “For years, IDCA has been investing in educating the industry and advocating on the global necessity of their effective design, development, and operations. In 2025, $580B in investment was directed toward data centers, surpassing the oil and gas industry by $40B and demonstrating how data centers have become essential infrastructure in the modern era.”

Until recently, a data center was most commonly understood to be a single facility located at a specific site. IDCA’s Infinity Paradigm®️ recognizes that the function of the data center is to meet the needs of AI and Cloud and ultimately serve the application, and today’s business requirements usually demand delivery across multiple sites and facilities.

The world's data center footprint is currently 67 gigawatts (GW), according to IDCA research, with 43 percent of that consumption in the United States. The industry is now in its second year of an inflection point that will drive the worldwide footprint to between 250 and 300GW between 2030 and 2035. This growth will total between 270 and 350 percent, and as traditional data centers become AI centers, the consumption per facility and operational complexity will grow as dramatically.

The world has changed dramatically, requiring the reassessment of risks and highlighting the need for the Infinity Paradigm's holistic approach to understand, effectively design, and manage each Application Ecosystem. View and download The Infinity Paradigm®️ AE360®️ 2.0 Standards Framework here, and implement effective principles in meeting the needs of this AI-driven age.

“Business owners and technology stakeholders have never had a systematic and dynamic mechanism that provided a holistic end-result-driven evaluation of the effectiveness of the vast and disparate array of information, applications, resources, technologies, processes, personnel, infrastructure, documentation, standards, and governance that together, despite their complexity, form the digital ecosystem that powers their business in this AI age,” according to IDCA Chief Research Officer, Roger Strukhoff. “Without AE360 V2.0, there is no common language that allows businesses to effectively interact with their executive leadership and peers, as well as industry stakeholders, vendors, and service providers, in a way that assures projected business results.”

AE360 V2.0 documentation is now publicly available. It is, as well, a key component of IDCA's Infinity Paradigm®️, which empowers organizations to truly synchronize technology strategies, designs, plans, implementations, and operations with business strategy.

Gordon Gillerman serves as Chair of the IDCA Technical Committee, formerly with the Senior Executive Service (SES) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in releasing AE360 V2.0, noted that “The world has changed dramatically, requiring the reassessment of risks and highlighting the need for Infinity Paradigm’s holistic approach to understand, effectively design and mange each Application Ecostystem.”

Not only are data centers fundamental to the global digital economy, as their capabilities, resilience, and capacities support the sovereignty and economy, they are now pushing the envelope of digital capacities with AI. Data centers today can cost billions of dollars to construct, while the IT specifications they are designed for, namely the artificial intelligence (AI) chips, are changing faster than the construction time of a single site. IDCA believes that having a universal code of practice and a common language for best practice can benefit the ultimate investors of data centers and stakeholders of data.

IDCA’s AE360 V2.0 and Infinity Paradigm reflect the key idea that the function of a data center or AI factories is to serve the applications running in it, across multiple sites and facilities. Modern application requirements, including new IT workloads such as AI training and inference, and other high-density, high-performance compute tasks, impose difficult constraints across each layer of the data center's ecosystem, including construction designs, power delivery, heat rejection, water availability, and external utility and permitting dependencies. Data center developers and operators who have a need to learn more about IDCA's standards program should contact standards@idc-a.org.

About IDCA
International Data Center Authority (IDCA) is the global independent Digital Economy think tank that works with nations to create AI policies, Digital Hubs, and Digital Economies through the standardization of the approach, selection, design, feasibility, operation, and various processes and methodologies of digital infrastructure and related processes and systems. IDCA is represented in more than 40 countries and is active globally in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.