Busway (Busbar Trunking)

Busway, or busbar trunking, is a prefabricated metal enclosure carrying rigid copper or aluminum conductors that distributes power along a data hall in place of conventional cable trays and branch circuits. Mounted overhead above server rows, it lets technicians add or move rack-level power taps in minutes using plug-in tap-off boxes rather than running new cable, which matters as operators reconfigure floors for higher-density AI racks. Busway is typically rated from a few hundred amps up to several thousand amps per run, and operators frequently deploy it in an A/B dual-bus configuration so each rack draws from two independently fed busways for redundancy, mirroring the same N+1 or 2N logic applied to UPS and generator plant. Because it eliminates most of the branch-circuit wiring in a build, busway also shortens fit-out time on new colocation floors, a meaningful factor when developers are racing to bring capacity online against multi-year power-connection queues.