Data centres around the world, that host consumer and enterprise applications may see a shift towards using liquid cooling techniques, as opposed to the various forms of air cooling (room, row and rack) that are used for the vast majority of data centre workloads today.

Liquid cooling uses water or a refrigerant, to dissipate heat from CPUs and GPUs as they run their processes. The advantage of liquid cooling is the higher thermal efficiency of transferring heat through water as opposed to the air. While Liquid cooling is not a new technology it has been eschewed in favour of air cooling due to the more CAPEX intensive nature of building liquid cooling systems within data halls, and the ability of air conditioning systems to largely keep up with the heat generated by IT workloads, up until this point in time.

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A shift towards liquid cooling

Signals from industry are indicating that there may soon be a shift towards the use of various liquid cooling systems due to the increased use of GPUs to power high-density compute for workloads like AI model inferencing. This is driving up thermal loads of data centres beyond what many air-cooling systems can manage.

For example, data centre equipment vendor Vertiv sees liquid cooling as a core concept for its data centre of the future. New hyperscale facilities, purpose built for the likes of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform are architected with liquid cooling systems in mind, to support the new generation of GPU intensive high-performance compute.

However, the company also sees a need for brownfield enterprise level data centres to implement liquid cooling.

Others in the industry, also echo this sentiment. Equinix, by some metrics the largest data centre operator in the world, is also seeing demand for liquid cooling, not only from the largest hyperscalers, but also from regular retail enterprise tenants.

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Equinix, which provides wholesale single or low tenant data centres to hyperscalers, termed xScale, is seeing wide deployment of liquid cooling at these centres already. However, more recently the company is exploring deployment of liquid cooling at its retail IBX data centres. There are liquid cooled halls in Paris and Osaka with more coming in markets like Australia. Equinix believes the demand for smaller scale data centres with liquid cooling will come from demand for private AI computer services.

The hyperscale environment

While the largest deployments of AI workloads currently reside within hyperscale environments, as the market matures many enterprises may require the use of GPUs in their private enterprise data centre space. Enterprise datasets used to train and inference models can be massive. This can incur very high costs related to data egress as well as performance as data flows from a private database into a hyperscale environment.

Further, some enterprise may be concerned with privacy or data sovereignty when dealing with AI workloads. Lastly, latency can be an issue when dealing with large volumes of data, or mission critical applications supported by GPUs.

All these factors are driving demand for GPUs not just for hyperscale, but enterprise scale as well. This may create a bottleneck as the industry moves along the maturity curve in the adoption of AI at scale. Not only are GPU shortages still impacting the industry, driving up prices, the data centre infrastructure, like liquid cooling, needed to support usage, is not yet in place for smaller scale deployments. The future may be liquid cooled, but the journey has only just started.