Every four years, billions of fans around the world pile into stadiums or tune in at home to watch the Fifa World Cup unfold. The 2026 tournament is the first World Cup to be held across three nations and is already smashing records for in-person attendance, remote viewership, and sports betting.
Hosting a World Cup has always been a mammoth undertaking. Host cities’ populations swell by hundreds of thousands overnight. From transportation and security to ensuring local bars have enough beer to accommodate the Scots, a successful World Cup is as much a triumph of logistics and municipal planning as it is one of sporting excellence. Perhaps the most impressive distinction between this World Cup and those that came before it, however, is the level of technical sophistication.
The World Cup 2026 is indisputably the most technologically sophisticated and complex sporting event in history. From video assistant referees (VAR) and the newly debuted (in a world cup at least) referee cam, to real-time streaming, 5G private networks, distributed fibre infrastructure, network slicing, and new AI tools, the 2026 World Cup is a multi-national digital infrastructure stress test under live fire conditions.
AI-driven analytics, real-time performance data, immersive fan engagement platforms and increasingly advanced broadcast technologies have led to the invisible digital infrastructure layer that underpins a World Cup game becoming bigger, more complex, and more mission critical than ever before. The data centres hosting and managing this traffic require higher-density, more resilient electrical infrastructure than ever before if they’re to rise to the occasion.
A Goal Seen Round the World
The Argentinian midfielder crosses the ball, past one striker, finding Lionel Messi who delivers a shot from the edge of the penalty box past the Austrian keeper. The crowd goes wild. “Another immortal Messi moment!” the commentators cheer.
An electric moment on the pitch sparks tens of thousands of cascading actions throughout the web of digital infrastructure surrounding the field. Before the ball even hits the back of the net, Fifa’s goal-line technology registers its passage, sending data from 14 high-speed cameras focused on determining the position of the ball in real time to the officials on and off the pitch. That data is then rapidly processed to create a 3D animation to illustrate the decision to fans on television and on the giant screen inside the stadium.
Around the pitch, 45 cameras stream the moment in ultra-high definition via a private 5G network, bouncing data to editing suites and broadcaster channels. In the stands, tens of thousands of fans stream and record the goal on their mobile devices. In Lenovo’s state-of-the-art command centre, hundreds of miles away, AI systems crunch reams of data, updating and summarising reports for officials and organisers.
Verizon has spent over two years preparing their infrastructure. They’ve delivered a three to five times increase in bandwidth across all 11 US host stadiums, adding spectrum and installing thousands of antennas under seats and in higher sections to handle concentrated crowd loads.
Venues have been outfitted with private 5G networks to support the digital load, not just of the immense number of fans using their devices during the game, but of applications that simply didn’t exist as sporting events five years ago, like Lenovo’s new Referee View body cameras.
Then there’s the matter of AI. Through FIFA’s AI Pro platform, all 48 participating teams have access to advanced pre-match and post-match analytics capabilities. The platform uses AI agents that can query structured match data to generate tactical insights, performance assessments and strategic recommendations.
Managing, distributing, broadcasting, and analysing the tidal wave of data generated by a single goal in this tournament is a herculean feat of digital infrastructure engineering, and it all rests on the data centres supporting telecom and tech companies like Verizon and Lenovo. Every moment in every match needs to be captured, processed, and distributed to audiences scattered throughout multiple time zones, across multiple data governance frameworks, while keeping the viewing experience consistent, regardless of location or device.
To further complicate this, the World Cup is an event that lasts just five weeks. The infrastructure needed to support a major sporting tournament must scale rapidly and cost-effectively, and building permanent capacity for a short-term event is impractical. This has made flexible data centre and network infrastructure critical to an event like the World Cup.
Data Centre Power Resilience is Mission Critical at Major Sporting Events
As AI, streaming and real-time digital services place growing demands on data centres, resilient power distribution is becoming an increasingly important factor in the success of sporting events like the World Cup.
For broadcasters, sponsors, betting platforms, ticketing providers, security teams and streaming audiences, uninterrupted service is non-negotiable. A failure anywhere within the power chain has consequences far beyond the data hall itself, knocking out broadcast feeds, digital payments, VAR systems, crowd management platforms and fan engagement applications, which all rely on continuous uptime.
Global sporting events have become mission-critical digital infrastructure operations. The stadium is only the visible layer of a much larger technology ecosystem.
There have already been signs of how quickly service quality can come under pressure. During the group-stage draw between the Netherlands and Japan, viewers reported periods of blurry and degraded picture quality. One fan compared the sudden drop in picture quality to “watching on a 24 inch Granada rental in the early 80s.” As audience sizes mount throughout the tournament, so will the pressure to deliver a seamless viewing experience.
Building Infrastructure for the Next Generation of Sport
Power distribution has become a vital foundation for global sporting and cultural events. AI-driven analytics, immersive fan experiences, real-time statistics and increasingly sophisticated broadcasting technologies all require data centres capable of supporting higher-density workloads with greater levels of resilience.
As sporting events become more digitally connected and attract ever-larger audiences, data centre resilience and power availability will become critical considerations for organisers, broadcasters and technology providers alike. Future World Cups and Olympic Games are likely to incorporate even more advanced AI-powered broadcasting tools, richer interactive experiences, and larger volumes of real-time data. Supporting these innovations will require infrastructure capable of delivering greater compute density, lower latency and higher availability than ever before.
Meeting these demands will require the data centre industry to prioritise speed, agility and scalability. Operators and builders must accelerate power infrastructure deployment, strengthen the resilience of low-voltage switchgear and power distribution systems, and improve supply chain certainty across critical electrical components. Modular approaches to design and construction, particularly factory-built electrical infrastructure, are likely to play an increasingly important role. These solutions provide the flexibility and deployment speed needed to support large-scale events while maintaining operational resilience.
The future success of global sport will depend on far more than world-class venues and elite athletes. It will also depend on the strength of the digital infrastructure operating behind the scenes. In an era where fans expect instant access, uninterrupted streaming and real-time engagement, reliable power has become every bit as essential to the World Cup experience as the floodlights illuminating the pitch.
