- New architecture stacks cooling, power and IT infrastructure vertically to support ultra-large AI clusters
- Huawei opens design blueprints to the industry as power, space and cooling become constraints on AI infrastructure
Huawei has unveiled what it calls the world’s first 3D data center, a vertically stacked architecture designed to support massive AI computing clusters as soaring token demand puts increasing pressure on power, space and cooling.
The company made the announcement September 15 at the 2026 AIDC Industry Development Conference and 3D Data Center Field Meeting in Wuhu, Anhui Province, where it also released a book on the architecture and opened a library of preliminary design drawings to the industry.
The concept stacks traditionally horizontal data-center functions — including cooling, IT equipment, power supply and backup power — across four vertical layers.
Huawei says the approach turns data centers from construction projects into standardized products that can be prefabricated in factories and assembled on site.
New demands on AI infrastructure
The architecture is designed to support what Huawei describes as “supercomputing factories” with clusters of more than 100,000 Ascend AI accelerator cards.
Huawei Vice Chairman and Rotating and Acting Chair David Wang Tao (汪涛) said the rapid growth of models with trillions of parameters and token consumption is creating new demands on AI infrastructure.
China’s daily token consumption has risen from about 100 billion at the beginning of 2024 to roughly 500 trillion in 2026, an increase of nearly 5,000 times, he said.
Total computing capacity across the economy could grow 100,000-fold over the next decade, Wang added.
Exposing the limitations
Huawei Senior Vice President and Executive Supervisor Ren Shulu (任树录), the younger brother of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei (任正非), said high-density AI computing is exposing the limitations of conventional data centers in space, power and cooling.
Rack power consumption has risen from several or tens of kilowatts in the air-cooling era to 100kW or 200kW, he said.
Huawei says the 3D architecture can halve the time required for mechanical, electrical and plumbing delivery.
Huawei Cloud is already building 3D data centers at three major cloud hubs in Gui’an, Guizhou; Helinger, Inner Mongolia; and Wuhu, Anhui, in line with China’s “East Data, West Computing” strategy.
This is a national initiative to move data-intensive computing capacity to resource-rich western regions while serving demand from the more developed east.
Building up instead of out
Huawei’s decision to open its 3D data-center design library to the wider industry is significant as AI infrastructure increasingly runs into physical constraints.
Gartner forecasts that global data-center electricity consumption will reach 565 terawatt-hours in 2026, up 26% from the previous year.
As power and floor space become increasingly scarce, Huawei’s approach effectively transfers the logic of vertical power delivery and cooling from the chip level to the data-center level, using stacked infrastructure rather than simply expanding horizontally.
For cloud providers and data-center operators, another potential advantage is the architecture’s ability to accommodate multiple generations of AI chips.
Data centers typically operate for more than a decade, while AI accelerators can be replaced every one or two years.
Huawei says its decoupled architecture allows the underlying infrastructure to remain in place as computing hardware evolves, reducing the need to rebuild facilities around each new generation.
An attempt to shape the standard
Huawei Cloud CEO Zhou Yuefeng (周跃峰) said the company is willing to open the architecture rather than keep it as a proprietary solution.
“Competition is not the key; what matters is making the industry’s pie bigger,” Zhou said, citing the experience of 5G and arguing that international standardization can create a virtuous cycle.
With AI data-center standards still taking shape, Huawei is effectively using an open design approach to seek a role in defining how the next generation of AI infrastructure is built.
Otherwise, its 3D data-center push risks remaining a Huawei solution rather than becoming an industry standard.
Header image credit: Huawei
