US multinational data centre company Equinix has unveiled plans for liquid cooling technologies, such as direct-to-chip, across more than 100 of its International Business Exchange data centres worldwide.
Direct-to-chip cooling, also known as cold plate cooling or direct liquid cooling, involves circulating liquid over sever components to cool the heat.
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Equinix’s currently offers liquid-to-air cooling through in-rack heat exchangers in nearly all IBX locations.
The expansion aims to use cooling solutions for high-density hardware used in compute-intensive workloads like artificial intelligence (AI).
The surge in demand for data-intensive applications, particularly in the realm of AI requires more advanced cooling capabilities.
The direct-to-chip approach allows for the installation of servers in standard IT cabinets while employing an efficient liquid-cooling mechanism.
Rear-door heat exchangers, an alternative technology, use cooling coils and fans to capture heat from air-cooled IT equipment, mounted directly onto customer cabinets to handle higher cooling loads.
My Truong, field CTO for Equinix, emphasized the company’s technology and vendor-neutral approach as crucial for removing deployment friction of liquid cooling solutions in enterprise data centres.
Acknowledging the limitations of traditional air-cooling approaches for next-generation chips and AI infrastructure, Steve Walton, CEO of CoolIT Systems, said, “Liquid-cooling can offer better performance while saving energy and helping data centres operate more efficiently.”
Erez Freibach, co-founder and CEO of ZutaCore, emphasised the essential role of effective cooling solutions in data centres to keep pace with the evolving computing landscape. “We believe that liquid cooling has a critical role to play in supporting the next wave of digital infrastructure”
