Huawei officially took the wraps off the world's first 3D data center on September 15, unveiling the technology at the 2026 AIDC Industry Development Conference and 3D Data Center On-Site Meeting in Anhui. The company also released a monograph titled 3D Data Center and made public its 3D Data Center Conceptual Design Drawing Library.
The new architecture is designed to tackle pressing challenges facing large-scale AI computing centers: security and compatibility across successive generations of AI chips. Huawei's answer is a system-level redesign that borrows a page from chip fabrication, where the "power layer" and the "production layer" are kept strictly separate. The 3D data center takes the functional spaces that conventional facilities spread out horizontally and stacks them vertically into four layers — cooling, IT equipment, power supply, and backup power — from bottom to top.
"The 3D data center architecture we are releasing today can serve as a reference for the entire industry as it builds super-node clusters," said Wang Tao, Huawei's deputy chairman and rotating chairman. "By opening up our room models, standardized blueprints and solutions, Huawei aims to work with partners across the industry to build an open AI infrastructure ecosystem and lay a solid computing foundation for the intelligent world."
Ren Shulu, Huawei's senior vice president and standing supervisory board member, delivered a keynote titled "Generational Leap, Paradigm Innovation: Building a New Generation of AIDC Together." He described the 3D data center as a shift from "on-site construction" to "factory prefabrication and on-site assembly" — treating a data center as a standardized product that can be replicated at scale rather than a one-off custom project. High-density computing in the AI era, he noted, is putting intense pressure on traditional data centers in terms of space, power and cooling. Cabinet power has climbed from a few kilowatts, or perhaps a dozen, in the air-cooling era to 100 or 200 kilowatts today, and it will keep rising. Coping with such extreme energy density demands systematic paradigm innovation in power supply, cooling, operations and maintenance, and delivery timelines.
The 3D data center also offers a range of advantages: zoned isolation that keeps failures from spreading, zoned cooling for high energy efficiency, vertical power and cooling delivery with extremely short routing, and a factory productization model that enables standardized, prefabricated delivery and halves electromechanical delivery time. It also supports domain-based decentralized management and intelligent operations and maintenance. Huawei Cloud has already deployed three major cloud core hubs — in Gui'an, Guizhou; Horinger, Inner Mongolia; and Wuhu, Anhui — all of which are building 3D data centers at scale to meet the rapid growth and large-scale deployment needs of intelligent computing.
At the meeting, Huawei also released the monograph 3D Data Center and opened the "3D Data Center Conceptual Design Drawing Library".