Open Compute Project Accepts Power Compute Effectiveness White Paper Authored by Airsys Leaders

New metric gives data center operators a consistent way to evaluate capacity allocation before construction begins

WOODRUFF, S.C., Oct. 08, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Airsys, a global leader in mission-critical cooling for data centers, AI and high-performing digital infrastructure, today announced that the Open Compute Project has accepted its white paper on Power Compute Effectiveness (PCE), a first-of-its-kind metric designed to reveal how much provisioned power is allocated to IT compute — long before data center construction begins. The paper was authored by Airsys leaders, contributed to OCP, then peer reviewed and accepted under an open license.

As AI workloads push power density to unprecedented levels, data center operators are increasingly constrained not by physical floor space but by how provisioned electrical capacity is distributed within their facilities. A significant share of that power is allocated to cooling systems, electrical losses, and auxiliary loads rather than to IT racks. This stranded capacity that never reaches compute stays invisible during early design — when it’s easiest and least expensive to address — because existing industry metrics evaluate live operational performance rather than structural allocation. Airsys leaders authored PCE to close that gap.

Co-authored by Airsys Founder and CEO Yunshui Chen, Chief Strategic Relations Officer Paul Quigley, and Product Marketing Manager Jake Roberts, the framework provides a consistent methodology to quantify available compute power at the blueprint stage.

“Operators have spent years optimizing for how power is used inside a data center using existing metrics like Power Use Effectiveness, or PUE. PCE asks a different question: how much of the power facility you've already paid for is structurally reaching compute in the first place,” Chen said. “We built this framework to give the industry a common, design-level way to answer that question, and we believe the answer should benefit every operator, not just Airsys customers.”

Rethinking Capacity Allocation at the Blueprint Stage

PCE measures the ratio of provisioned electrical capacity within a defined facility boundary that is available for IT compute, after accounting for the facility’s redundancy requirements. Expressed as a dimensionless value between 0 and 1, PCE offers three key characteristics for data center design:

• Makes Stranded Capacity Visible: Quantifies power allocated to cooling, distribution losses, and auxiliary loads directly from facility design documentation, prior to facility commissioning.
• Complements Established Operational Metrics: Works alongside metrics like Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). While PUE measures operational energy efficiency during facility activity, PCE measures structural capacity allocation at the design level.
• Universal, Vendor-Neutral Applicability: Scale-independent methodology applies across 20 MW colocation sites, 100 MW hyperscale campuses, and retrofit evaluations without favoring specific hardware architectures.
  
  

“PUE has served this industry well, but it looks in the rearview mirror at operational energy efficiency. PCE is meant to be the windshield,” Quigley said. “A design team can take the facility design documents, starting with the single-line diagram, and determine how much of the provisioned power is allocated to compute and how much is allocated to cooling, electrical losses and auxiliary load, before a single watt is drawn. When power decides how big a data center can be, that's a question every operator should be able to answer on the drawing board.”

As compute density climbs and grid interconnection constraints grow, PCE will be foundational to opening an industry conversation about how provisioned power is allocated at the design stage, giving operators, owners, and planners a common way to evaluate capacity allocation before construction begins.

“Energy stewardship starts long before a facility goes live. The path every kilowatt takes between the utility meter and the rack is more nuanced than most people realize,” Roberts said. “PCE is a provisional metric, and the earlier we can calculate the power allocation for a facility, starting in the design phase, or in the retrofit/upgrade stage, the better we can steward that power for its entire life. Having OCP peer review and accept the white paper opens the door to broader industry adoption, and I'm excited for a future where we can plan with metrics that help us prioritize power allocation and stewardship from the start.”

The full white paper, “Power Compute Effectiveness (PCE): A Provisioned Capacity Allocation Metric for the New Data Center Era,” is available through the OCP Contribution Database at https://www.opencompute.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/OCP-PCE-White-Paper-Final.pdf.

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