How are data centres evolving to keep pace with demand?

Last year was a monumental year for data centres in the UK. Roughly 100 new data centres were planned for construction over the next five years in 2025, marking a new era of digital infrastructure expansion and investment.

It’s no surprise that the principal driving factor behind the increase in buildouts is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its associated Large Language Models (LLMs), which require a vast amount of computing power, energy, and specialised infrastructure.

So with the UK now firmly established as a data centre hotbed, how will these buildouts handle these power‑constrained environments in the year to come? Let’s take a look at some specialised infrastructure we can see adopted in 2026 and beyond.

1.6T transceivers

Transceivers are ultimately the unsung heroes of data centres. While specialised accelerators like GPUs tend to dominate industry news, they wouldn’t be facilitated without the optical transceivers that actually move the data between them.

By converting electrical signals to optical signals, transceivers enable high‑speed communication over fibre at 100G, 400G, 800G — and now, 1600G. Referred to as ‘1.6T’, these transceivers already made a huge impact on AI data centres in 2025 by empowering ultra‑high‑speed data transmission at 1.6 Terabits per second.

The transceivers transform infrastructure by doubling the capacity of current 800G modules for faster exchange between accelerators and storage in AI training clusters. In turn, this leads to longer inter‑switch links up to 2km, extending bandwidth density and evolving existing architectures.

The implementation of these 1.6T transceivers is expected to reach over 10+ million this year, with companies like AddOn Networks, the world’s largest independent manufacturer of optical transceivers and high‑speed cabling, expanding their transceiver offering with the addition of 1.6T last month to bolster low insertion loss and strong signal integrity.

Quantum preparations

Even with specialised GPUs and chips, AI workloads place extreme pressure on power availability and physical space within data centres. With traditional scaling approaches reaching limits, quantum computing is seen as the solution to bridge this gap.

Quantum computing uses the principles of quantum mechanics to solve complex problems far beyond the capabilities of traditional, binary‑based computers. While fault‑tolerant quantum computers are generally expected to be widespread in 5 to 15 years, quantum data centres from the likes of IBM have already appeared in Germany.

But with quantum computers eventually possessing the capabilities to break traditional encryption methods like Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA), defence is essential, and comes in the form of post‑quantum cryptography (PQC).

PQC algorithms are designed to run on classical computers while resisting quantum attacks. But with 84% of IT and telecoms operators currently not having any formal PQC plan in place according to the Trusted Computing Group’s State of PQC Readiness report, it will be intriguing to see how data centre operators pair the integration of quantum and PQC in years to come.

Looking ahead

With data centre power capacity accelerating to roughly 250% by 2030, there’s no doubt we can expect to see 1.6T transceivers, quantum architectures, and advanced optical circuit switching hold the fort along with a whole host of other solutions to support this rapid data centre growth.