My first job as a business journalist was covering Michigan’s automotive supplier industry, and one of the hottest ongoing stories was the Big Three automakers’ push to apply a new quality standard across the industry. I was in and out of factories and foundries talking with plant managers about how the new supplier quality management program would shake up how they worked and were evaluated.

So, I felt like my career had come full circle this week as I talked with leaders from Google and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) about a quality management system being developed for suppliers to the data center industry. Dubbed Data Center Excellence 9000, it’s modeled after industry-specific supplier quality standards used in automotive, aerospace, and telecommunications. The standard would establish common quality expectations and performance metrics that data center developers and operators would apply to their suppliers.

DCE 9000 working groups are developing the standard right now, and they’re moving fast. Participants include Google, AWS, Oracle, and many top industry suppliers, coordinated by TIA. The goal is to have a draft by late September and a published standard in Q1 2027. New working group members can still join and help shape the standard.

“We’re trying to accomplish this in just one year — 25% of a typical ISO standard life cycle,” says Govind Ramu, a senior technical program manager for data center quality at Google, speaking on the Data Center World webinar. “We have to keep up with the pace and the speed of this industry. We can’t afford a four-year cycle.”

DCE 9000 is being purpose-built for the data-center industry’s physical infrastructure supply chain, starting with power, cooling, and mechanical infrastructure that’s critical to performance and uptime.

DCE 9000 would complement the existing ANSI/TIA-942 standard, which focuses on requirements and guidelines for designing, building, and operating data centers. DCE 9000 provides a quality management framework to assess and track performance of the components that go into building the data center, including how the equipment performs over time.

“Is your chiller going to keep chilling a month or year from now?” explains Mike Regan, vice president at TIA. ANSI/TIA-942 isn’t meant to account for the performance of suppliers of infrastructure components used to build the data center. “That’s where DCE 9000 comes in. The standards don’t compete; they’re extremely complementary.”

What would DCE 9000 monitor? Possibilities include separate metrics related to defects found during factory testing, during on-site deployment, and during use in the field. It could cover manufacturing quality indicators such as first-pass yield, and logistics performance data such as on-time delivery and installation. The goal: consistent quality monitoring that drives higher product quality and reliability, faster delivery, higher output, and lower supply-chain costs.

“It’s not just about developing a standard,” Ramu said. “It’s about transforming an entire industry to the next level of maturity.”

You can watch the discussion with Govind, Mike, and me on demand.