B2B media brand Data Center Dynamics has seen its turnover increase by 175% to more than £11m a year since 2020 helped by the AI boom.
DCD was founded in 2001 as an industry directory and events business covering the “digital infrastructure of the internet”.
The site now reports on the funding, designing, building and operating of data infrastructure “from chip level up”, said editor-in-chief Sebastian Moss.
While the site has always covered data centres, the scale and definition of these has drastically changed.
Content is less about the “model side” of AI, with “a jillion publications on that”, but focuses more on how data centres are powered, operated and cooled.
UK-based Data Center Dynamics Ltd – which uses American English because the US is “historically” the “data centre land” – has been owned by InfraXmedia since 2022. InfraXmedia also owns events companies Data Center Nation and Yotta Events, and acquired networking publication SDX Central in 2025.
Covid saw DCD ‘grow like crazy’
DCD started to see a boom in traffic and revenue during the Covid pandemic, as investors moved towards technology stocks.
“There was literally only one safe place to put money into and that’s data centres,” said Moss.
The investment boom led to a “real wave of data centre building” and an increase of newcomers to the industry: investors, non-industry people trying to understand how Zoom works, and “cloud guys”, said Moss, adding these people wanted to learn and turned to DCD for the information.
Having existed for around 20 years, DCD’s new readers trusted them, said Moss, and the company moved into digital events and expanded its team, “and that allowed us to really start to grow like crazy”.
Just as business was “starting to normalise” post Covid, the AI boom hit.
“The big difference there was, [during] Covid, it was ‘we just need more data centres’,” said Moss. “The AI boom was ‘we need more data centres, but they need to be fundamentally new.”
For everyone, “this is a new world”, said Moss, referencing new chips being made and air cooling switching to liquid cooling systems across the industry. This created renewed demand for specialist reporting.
“Everything that we reported on [was at] a much bigger scale,” Moss said, “you never quite reach the end of the rainbow.”
Today, the title claims to be the biggest publication in digital infrastructure by traffic – DCD has seen nine consecutive years of double-digit growth in page views traffic, reaching 22.5 million page views in 2025.
In the year ending December 2024, turnover for Data Center Dynamics Ltd reached £11.2m, up from £8.8m in 2023, according to Companies House filings . Adjusted EBITDA stood at £2.2m.
Of total revenue, £5.6m came from the US, £4.6m from EMEA, £531,000 from Asia and £122,000 from Spain and Latin America.
Three quarters of revenue comes from what DCD calls the “sales enablement platform” which includes events, and the remaining quarter is from training services and marketing (internally called “workforce development”), such as whitepaper sales, sponsors, and newsletter, site and print ads. In 2026, parent company InfraXmedia expects to reach £50 million in turnover.
The site is free to air but readers are invited to register to download white papers (turning these reports into a lead-generation tool for paying clients).
DCD ltd employed 65 staff in 2024, up from 51 in 2023, and according to Moss now has a total headcount of 150 worldwide. Some 18 staff are employed in publishing/editorial with more specialist roles recruited in recent years.
“We’ve been able to bring in a chip person… an energy person… a telecommunications person, and get [those] holistic specialisms,” said Moss.
The site’s daily story output has increased from three a decade ago to 23 today – but traffic growth has still “outpaced our output growth”, said Moss.
“A smaller team must focus on quality, and then you scale quantity… without dropping the quality part.”
DCD’s stories are checked multiple times before publication, he added.
The site’s growth follows extensive cutbacks in the world of technology journalism in 2025: in June, Techcrunch made the decision to pull out of the UK and Europe , followed by 19 staff cut at tech news and reviews site CNET in July.
UK-based technology newsbrand Digital Frontier closed in the same month with 16 staff made redundant, around the same time that Informa Techtarget announced plans to cut 10% of its workforce.
“Finding that niche and then doing a really good job on that niche pays off, because we’re able to build that audience,” said Moss. “Where I think [other tech titles] went wrong, especially at that inflection point of AI, was a lot of… companies didn’t do anything.”
He added turning to alternate platforms such as Linkedin to run sponsored webinars has also been important, “so even if the site starts losing traffic, we will go to where the person is”.
Having conversations about the “value of journalists” is also crucial, he said, with people being seen as a “unit” in bigger companies.
“Some of it is just you pick a bad topic, and the world changes,” he said. “Like, you’re Chimney Sweeper Quarterly, and no one uses chimneys anymore.”
Bucking ChatGPT concerns
Many publishers are seeing AI answer engines cite their content and prevent clickthroughs, but DCD finds its traffic from ChatGPT has increased when the chatbot cites its site.
While celebrity and showbiz queries are most likely to trigger AI Overviews for titles like the Daily Mail , internet infrastructure experts are not going to “want to risk that something is hallucinated” – potentially protecting it from “Google zero” .
“If I’m going to use a liquid cooling solution where I need to make sure these 50 different components all sync up… I’m going to watch the 45-minute webinar rather than get the five bullet points,” Moss said.
With feature-styles pieces, Moss said DCD tries “make a physical aspect to it”, for example basing pieces around site visits, as to protect it from chatbot-like replication – DCD once sent a feature to the moon , with a SpaceX rocket carrying the piece on a drive when it launched.
“We’ll happily be on any of these AI platforms as long as they reference us,” said Moss. “And then it’s our job to make sure that if they reference us, a percentage of those people click on it, [and] what they get is better than what they read on ChatGPT… give them a reason to stay.”
DCD editor-in-chief Sebastian Moss with a rocket background. Picture: Sebastian Moss
Readership ‘too valuable’ for ‘quick paywall win’
DCD currently offers its editorial content for free, supported by seven newsletters (with 128,000 free subscribers across all), a quarterly print magazine, digital and physical supplements, a fortnightly podcast, awards show and webinars.
It is aiming to move towards a registration wall with the addition of a fourth web developer and an “intelligence analyst division”, but Moss said being “number one on readership [is] too valuable to throw away for a quick paywall win”.
Content will remain free for the foreseeable future, Moss said, but some digital supplements will be data-gated, and market sales data is to be subscription based.
For example, internal analysis of DCD’s reporting showed interest in liquid cooling was growing before it was reflected in the stock market, an insight that could be monetised in the form of reports, said Moss.
DCD also plans to hire an investment reporter, confident sector growth will continue in the wake of OpenAI’s $1.4trn spend in data centre commitments over next five to six years , announced in November.
“Just by the capex commitment of the biggest companies for the next year, I’m not stressed about this year,” Moss said adding if the “AI bubble” bursts, DCD remains in a strong position long-term as a well-established business.
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