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What is the Bisnow DICE Series?
DICE (Data Centers Investment Conference & Expo) is Bisnow's dedicated conference series for the data center industry. Each event convenes the developers, investors, operators and infrastructure providers actively shaping data center growth in that market, with programming built around the deals, challenges and opportunities specific to the region or topic. View all upcoming DICE events here!
Are you an end user?
Hyperscalers, colocation providers (non-sales), investors, private equity, or enterprise tenants - email Virginia.Baker@bisnow.com to be considered for a complimentary pass.
Speakers and Panels
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Jay Smith
VP, Data Center Operations and Engineering
Evocative
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Syona Sarma
Senior Director & Head of Hardware Infrastructure
Cloudflare
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Adine Le
Manager, Data Center
Lambda
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Mark Calvano
President
Calvano Development
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Ron Godinez
Founder
RC Power
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Karin Selchert
EVP
AC³E Energy Services
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Hadi Alla Ali
Business Development Executive
Nortek Data Center Cooling
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Nathan Libner
Regional Manager
Munters
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Mark Ardire
Director
LG Electronics (LGE)
Why Attend West Data Center Operations & Cooling Conference & Expo
Why This Matters
The conversation about data center operations has changed more in the past two years than in the previous ten. For most of the cloud era, operators were optimizing known systems: managing PUE targets, staffing facility teams, scheduling maintenance windows and keeping air-cooled infrastructure running reliably at densities that, while growing, were still manageable with established playbooks. AI has broken that model.
GPU clusters at 60, 80 and 100-plus kW per rack are not an incremental density increase. They require cooling infrastructure — direct liquid cooling, rear-door heat exchangers, immersion systems — that most existing West Coast facilities were not designed to support and that most operations teams have not been trained to run. The water consumption, the thermal management complexity, the coordination between mechanical systems and IT load patterns, the vendor relationships and supply chains — all of it is different enough that the gap between operators who have deployed AI-scale cooling and those who have not is already measurable in customer outcomes.
At the same time, the workforce problem is acute and underappreciated. The West Coast data center market is in the middle of a build cycle that is adding capacity faster than the regional talent pipeline can support it. Qualified data center technicians, critical facilities engineers and cooling system specialists are scarce. The operators who are solving this — through apprenticeship programs, internal training tracks, partnerships with community colleges and deliberate retention strategies — are gaining an operational advantage that does not show up in a rack count but shows up in uptime, commissioning speed and customer confidence.
DICE Management, Operations & Cooling West is built for the people who run facilities, not just the people who build them. The panels are designed for operators, engineers and technical leads who need to make decisions about cooling technology, workforce strategy and operational resilience right now — not a year from now when the next campus is already live.
What You'll Learn
How operators are retrofitting and commissioning AI-density cooling infrastructure in facilities that were not originally designed for it — and where the limits of that approach are
What direct liquid cooling, immersion and hybrid cooling deployments actually look like in production on the West Coast, beyond the pilot stage
How the West Coast talent shortage is affecting commissioning timelines, operational quality and incident response — and which workforce development models are working
How leading operators are managing the handoff between construction and operations as campuses scale faster than organizational capacity
What AI workload volatility means for thermal management, power distribution and maintenance scheduling when load patterns look nothing like cloud-era baselines
Who You'll Network With
Data center operations leads and critical facilities managers, chief engineers and mechanical and electrical systems specialists, hyperscaler and cloud campus operations teams, colocation operators and managed services providers, cooling technology vendors and system integrators, workforce development and training program leaders, commissioning and quality assurance professionals, construction-to-operations transition leads and technical recruiters and HR leaders active in the West Coast data center market.
Agenda
| Time | Activity |
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8:00 AM
9:00 AM
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Registration, Breakfast and Networking
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9:00 AM
9:45 AM
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Cooling at AI Scale: What West Coast Operators Are Actually Deploying and What Is Still Being Figured Out
GPU clusters at 60 to 100-plus kW per rack require cooling approaches that most West Coast facilities were not designed to support and that most operations teams are still building the expertise to run. Direct liquid cooling, rear-door heat exchangers and immersion systems are no longer roadmap items — they are in production, and the operators who have deployed them at scale have learned things that are not yet in any vendor white paper. Dig into what the real deployment picture looks like across Silicon Valley and the broader West Coast, where legacy air-cooled facilities can be credibly retrofitted for AI density and where they cannot, how water consumption and thermal management complexity are changing facility operating costs and what the teams running AI-scale cooling in production wish they had known before the first cluster went live. |
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9:45 AM
10:00 AM
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Coffee and Networking Break
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10:00 AM
10:45 AM
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The Operations Gap: Running Facilities When the Build Cycle Is Outpacing the Talent Pipeline
The West Coast data center market is adding capacity at a pace the regional workforce was not built to support. Qualified critical facilities engineers, data center technicians and cooling system specialists are scarce enough that staffing gaps are already showing up in commissioning timelines and incident response windows. The operators gaining ground are not waiting for the talent market to catch up — they are building internal training programs, running apprenticeship tracks in partnership with community colleges and trade schools, and designing retention strategies around career progression rather than compensation alone. Dig into what the West Coast talent shortage actually looks like in practice at the facility level, which workforce development models are producing qualified technicians fast enough to matter, how operators are managing knowledge transfer as experienced engineers retire and what facilities are sacrificing operationally when they cannot staff to standard. |
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10:45 AM
11:30 AM
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From Commission to Steady State: Managing the Hardest 18 Months in a Campus Lifecycle
The period between mechanical completion and fully stabilized operations is where the most consequential operational decisions get made — and where the most expensive mistakes happen. AI-era campuses are compressing that window because customers need capacity commissioned faster than the systems have had time to prove themselves. Integrated systems testing, thermal envelope validation, load-ramping protocols and the handoff between construction and operations teams are all under pressure from delivery schedules that were not designed with operational readiness as the primary constraint. Dig into how leading operators on the West Coast are managing the construction-to-operations transition as campuses scale in phases, what commissioning quality looks like when the schedule is set by customer commitments rather than system readiness, how AI workload volatility — unpredictable load spikes, rapid ramp-up and ramp-down cycles — is changing steady-state thermal and power management and where the gap between a facility that looks commissioned and one that is genuinely ready to run at full AI density actually shows up. |
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11:30 AM
12:00 PM
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Post Panel Networking
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Venue
DoubleTree by Hilton San Jose
2050 Gateway Place
San Jose, CA 95110
Ballroom/Floor: Oak+Fir Room / Conference Center on 2nd Floor
Parking Rates:
$5.00 per car - QR Code to be provided to get discounted rate
Tickets
Platinum Sponsors
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Gold Sponsors
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Silver Sponsors
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Media Sponsors
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Impact Partners
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