A model-based approach to determining an optimal configuration for a data center may use an environmental chamber to characterize the performance of various data center configurations at different combinations of temperature and altitude. Telemetry data may be recorded from different configurations as they execute a stress workload at each temperature/altitude combination, and the telemetry data may be used to train a corresponding library of models. When a new data center is being configured, the temperature/altitude of the new data center may be used to select a pre-trained model from a similar temperature/altitude. Performance of the current configuration can be compared to the performance of the model, and if the model performs better, a new configuration based on the model may be used as an optimal configuration for the data center.