It's obviously not new. ±400VDC architecture was presented at Open Compute last year, which is a fair indicator that the presenter had put it into practice at least 5 years prior to disclosing it. 48VDC distribution within a rack, and 48-to-1V direct regulators for CPUs, were both contributed to OCP 7 years ago, at which point they were both old hat. And 48VDC telco junk is, of course, totally ancient.
Many datacenters I'd been to at that point were already DC.
Didn't think this was that new of a trend in 2026, but also acknowledge I did not visit more than a handful of datacenters since 2007.
It just seemed like a undenyably logical thing to do.