The 2nd Annual Data Center Frontier Trends Summit concluded with a dynamic keynote from Amy Marks, SVP of Innovation, and Nancy Novak, Chief Innovation Officer at Compass Datacenters. Their joint presentation was a call to the digital infrastructure industry to reframe how we think about innovation, culture, and the future of data centers.

Rethinking What Innovation Really Means

Marks and Novak began with a challenge: companies talk about the importance of innovation, but how many actively teach people how to innovate? Innovation, they emphasized, isn’t just about coming up with creative ideas.  Innovation requires providing value, implementing solutions, and ensuring they are absorbed into an organization. Without courage, financial backing, and cultural support, even the best ideas fail to take root.

The pair reminded the audience that money is always at the heart of whether innovation succeeds or stalls. Business models, incentives, and risk management often dictate whether new approaches are adopted. True innovation requires holistic thinking that weighs not only opportunity, but also impact, risk, and benefit across the ecosystem.

An Industry of Industries

As she presented, Marks also underscored that digital infrastructure is not a single industry, but a convergence of multiple fields including (but not limited to) construction, engineering, technology, and development. Each comes with its own opportunities and challenges. For example, contractors often focus on minimizing loss, while data center developers push for speed and scale. The tension between these forces creates barriers to innovation, but also opportunities for disruption when the right partnerships are formed.

The Demand Storm: Why Change Can’t Wait

Adding to the discussion, Novak highlighted the exponential pace of change sharing that five-year cycles have become three-year cycles, and mega-campuses of 300–600 MW are now the norm. Alongside power demands, the industry faces global challenges including climate change, healthcare, military needs, and transportation infrastructure. The message was clear in that we cannot continue to build as developers have for the past 100 years. To meet today’s pressures, the sector must embrace digitalization, industrialized construction, and new models of collaboration.

From Prefab to Industrialized Construction

Mark’s career has primarily focused on prefab builds, where she is kindly referred to as the ‘Queen of Prefab.”  Today, prefabrication, which was once resisted, is now normalized. Marks celebrated this shift but stressed it is only the beginning. The next phase is industrialized construction at scale, where prefabrication delivers measurable ESG benefits, efficiency, and repeatability. Achieving this requires strong relational partnerships rather than transactional ones where suppliers and contractors must see long-term runway to invest in automation, R&D, and data transparency.

Culture, Courage, and Diversity as Drivers

Perhaps the strongest theme of the keynote was cultural change. Innovation, Marks and Novak argued, demands courage.  Innovation requires space for people to speak up, psychological safety to fail, and leadership that provides “air cover” for bold ideas. Diversity was another initiative highlighted, specifically in background, thought process, learning style, and demographics, and not just a social value, it’s a business imperative. Without it, organizations risk blind spots that put both people and business continuity at risk.

They also pointed to the importance of neurodiversity and pattern recognition, noting that not all innovators are verbal or conventional thinkers. Leaders must create multiple pathways for voices to be heard and valued.

Building Frameworks for Innovation

The session closed with practical advice: innovation can be learned through training, design thinking, and growth mindset development. Organizations must provide first steps for innovators, not just vision statements, and recognize that resistance to change comes from within. Dissatisfaction was also addressed. Whether dissatisfaction is from challenges or aspirations, they challenge that it is ultimately the seed of transformation.

Marks and Novak left attendees with a challenge: think about how your business could go out of business, and how it could triple. Innovation lies in holding both possibilities and building frameworks that empower diverse teams to act boldly, fail safely, and ultimately transform the industry.

To learn more about the Data Center Frontier Trends Summit, visit www.dcftrends.com/2025.

To learn more about Amy Marks, Nancy Novak and Compass Datacenters, visit www.compassdatacenters.com.