There is an art to modernization – particularly in a maturing industry caught in a whirlwind of innovation.

Data center owners are challenged to keep pace with capacity, efficiency, and reliability improvements even as the available capital and operating expenditures required to make those improvements are constantly recast.

Against that backdrop, determining which investments will genuinely improve a site’s performance and value is an increasingly complex challenge for any one person working across large-scale data center operations.

And crucially, as AI readiness becomes an increasingly important measure of digital success, the ability of infrastructure to support denser, hotter workloads is becoming critical. It also comes with very real demands on the energy and water required to power and cool high-performance computing.

“Capital requests start arriving faster than anyone can compare them. Two sites ask for money in the same quarter, and there’s no common language to say which one wins. Leadership is approving projects but can be challenged to confidently answer board questions about what the whole estate is worth and longer-term capital allocation plans,” says Joe Staib, CEO of Enabled Energy.

When the future posture of each site is understood, capital allocation becomes much easier, making translating complex facility data into clear ownership decisions central to Staib’s work. Alongside “a couple of engineering degrees,” more than 35 years in the industry have given him the technical proficiency to approach brownfield modernization from multiple perspectives.

“I speak engineer, but I also speak business,” says Staib. “So doing exactly that high-level engineering and program management, I found my way into the data center space about 15 years ago.”

With no product to push and no predetermined answers, Enabled Energy’s objective is simply to identify what is right for the site, the portfolio, and, ultimately, for the owner.

Untapped potential

Modernization can manifest itself in the way of equipment upgrades. On their own, individual upgrades often come as a means to an end – just a way to avoid failure towards end-of-life.

But viewed in the context of a holistic, portfolio-level strategy, those same upgrades can deliver significantly greater value. The benefit compounds when those improvements are implemented programmatically across many sites rather than one at a time.

A mature site initially viewed as having limited growth potential is reassessed through portfolio analysis. By identifying available infrastructure capacity and market demand, the facility shifts from “maintain” to “expand”, increasing revenue potential, capital investment, and overall enterprise value.

The more visibility and granular intelligence owners have across their sites, the greater the confidence they can have in placing capital where it will deliver the greatest benefit – creating capacity, resilience, or value.

“Think of your favorite sports team. If the coach spends all their time with the second or third string, the first team will struggle on game day. Infrastructure portfolios work the same way,” says Staib, adding:

“A cooling upgrade here, a switchgear replacement there – each may sound small on its own, yet collectively they can crowd out a far more valuable move you never consider because no one was able to confidently compare options across the estate. across the estate.”

A portfolio-level view also enables intelligent investment sequencing. Many sites appear constrained until deeper analysis reveals they are expansion candidates, rather than maintenance candidates. A consistent, evidence-based view allows leadership to allocate capital with conviction, sequence work sensibly, and defend those choices to a board or investment committee.

“Without a portfolio view, everything competes as an emergency, and good assets get starved while marginal ones get over-served.”

Modernization over default new construction

Some of the greatest untapped value lies in capacity that already exists but cannot be used or sold – stranded by an airflow constraint, a controls limitation, a white space configuration, or simply a lack of good information about what the building can really do.

“We see it constantly: a site that looks full on paper but has real headroom once you understand it well,” says Staib.

“When you unlock stranded capacity, you create revenue from an asset you already own – that flows straight to value. When you improve reliability, you reduce the risk of outages that damage customer trust and carry real financial penalties. And when you cut operating costs, you lift margins on every megawatt. Each of those improves the economics of the individual site.”

There is a tremendous opportunity to modernize existing data centers. About half of data center facilities are more than ten years old, and those facilities hold 38 percent of total installed IT capacity, according to the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2024.

There are clear use cases where existing space and power are already available in an urban core, with low-latency connectivity built into the network. Remodeling part of that facility and introducing a fractional load into an existing building can therefore be done in a fraction of the time and, often, a fraction of the cost of new construction.

At the same time, statistics indicate that the trend toward new construction is surging globally, accounting for 61.8 percent of the global data center market in 2025 via rising greenfield hyperscale and colocation facility development.

But the cost of doing so is also at an all-time high, with 2026 construction spending in the US nearly doubling since 2024, reaching $85.3 billion amid higher material costs, labor shortages, and increasingly advanced cooling systems.

Clearly, new construction is an avenue of incredible value – otherwise, so many wouldn’t be doing it. But at this level of investment, it requires a closer look at where budget can be reallocated for greater efficiency.

“New construction is attractive because it’s clean. It’s also how the industry has been wired to think. Growth has meant build.”

There are, of course, realities in older facilities that can limit their ability to support new loads, making building new a sensical choice at a certain scale. However, Staib sees misconceptions about retrofitting.

There can be a misplaced perception in the industry that to retrofit is to “patch” – essentially a lesser, make-do path compared with the definitive work of building new. Retrofits can also be seen as inherently riskier because the building is live.

According to Staib, however, working in an operating environment is a discipline that can be planned for – and it can be less risky than betting years and hundreds of millions of dollars on a new site entangled in politcal, permitting and power constraints.

“The trouble is that new capacity is slower, more capital-intensive, and increasingly constrained by the two things nobody can conjure on demand – power and time. Meanwhile, the capacity already sitting inside existing buildings goes unexamined,” he says.

In this way, modernization and new construction can be seen as complementary strategies. Existing sites deserve the same rigorous evaluation as greenfield opportunities before capital is committed. The goal is determining which approach creates the most value for a given asset and ownership strategy.

Understanding asset potential

In reality, a smart modernization program across a portfolio should be a precise, engineered upgrade, with the potential to deliver one of the largest, highest-return moves an operator can make.

Even modest efficiency gains across a portion of the existing fleet can free up capacity equivalent to many new-built data centers. At the larger end, a master plan can take a legacy building to tens of additional megawatts by phasing power and cooling intelligently, rather than rebuilding from scratch.

As Staib emphasizes, the world's operating data centers represent roughly 120GW of installed power. At a typical PUE of 1.5, about 80GW of that is production IT load, leaving some 40GW of electrical and mechanical overhead. Recovering just a quarter of that overhead would unlock around 10GW of additional capacity - the equivalent of 100 new 100MW data centers, or about eight percent of the entire global installed base – without building a single new facility.

Staib’s point is that new construction will always have its place, but treating it as the default answer – rather than one option among several – risks leaving significant value stranded in the sites owners already have.

“The question isn't whether to modernize or build new. The question is what posture each site is positioned to support and where capital will create the most value.”

Before pouring more energy, water, and capital into new construction, the industry owes it to customers and communities to extract the full value from what is already built.

Where energy goes, capital flows

Data is the business of data centers. They are experts at generating, collecting, and retaining it. But at a certain point, too much data, presented without structure or context, becomes a hindrance rather than an asset.

Organized systematically, however, data can unlock a programmatic approach to infrastructure modernization.

“Programmatic means repeatable. Instead of a one-off study that ends when the report is delivered, you build a system that continuously surfaces opportunity, ranks it, and turns it into funded work,” says Staib. “In our world, that runs along a simple path – from projects, to site intelligence, to portfolio intelligence, to capital allocation, to transformation programs.”

Through Enabled Energy’s methodology, Staib explains, each facility is scored against the factors that move value – capacity headroom, EBITDA improvement, reliability, and AI readiness – along with a confidence level indicating how firm those numbers are today.

“A high-value opportunity with low confidence isn’t ready for capital; it’s ready for validation. Layer in the owner’s intent and you can translate raw metrics into a clear direction for each asset – invest, validate, sequence, or monitor.”

Prioritization then ranks those opportunities across the estate, so capital goes to the highest value move first, rather than simply the nearest fire. Modernization is where that intelligence becomes tangible – validated projects and programs that can actually free capacity and improve the performance of the asset.

“The whole idea of Enabled Energy’s NextField is to turn asset intelligence into a clear understanding of posture, investment priorities, and portfolio capital allocation. It’s the golden thread that connects incremental data points to real value and technical capital decisions,” Staib emphasizes.

And there’s a human dividend, too. Facilities that are better planned and understood are steadier to operate – better for the teams who run them and the customers who depend on them.

A core element of the Enabled Energy approach is that its people are practitioners who have operated in these environments themselves, keeping recommendations practical and executable.

That experience matters because a screening can look very different from one building to the next, depending on the quality and depth of the available data. The data itself is valuable, but knowing how to interpret it in the context of a real operating environment is equally important.

Don’t underestimate your site

The pressure has all arrived at once. AI is reshaping demand, power is constrained, facilities are aging, costs are rising, and sustainability expectations keep climbing. Any one of these challenges is manageable. Together, they overwhelm a project-by-project mindset and test owners who can’t see the full picture.

A trusted, independent advisor helps leadership connect infrastructure realities to business outcomes, bringing distinct technical, operational, and financial considerations into a single decision-making framework. This is also a moment that rewards good judgment when it comes to managing the hype around building in future capacity.

“The sites you already own are probably worth more than you think. You may have additional options beyond building your way to the next increment of capacity, resilience, or return,” Staib concludes.

Not every site should be expanded. Not every site should be modernized. And not every site should be replaced. The opportunity is to understand what each site can become, establish its most appropriate future posture, and direct capital toward the opportunities with the greatest ability to create value.

Enabled Energy helps data center owners uncover stranded capacity, validate opportunities, and turn insights into actionable capital plans. Discover what's truly possible at enabledenergy.com.