Phil Read, Senior Director, Colocation Product Management, Equinix is a proven Commercial and business development leader with nearly 20 years of experience building scalable high-performing teams that deliver and support advanced network infrastructure solutions.

There’s no doubt that AI is changing the face of the digital economy and business leaders are thinking about how to find the right IT infrastructure to support their company’s AI goals. At the same time, data center providers are keeping pace through innovation, achieving higher levels of performance, efficiency, and sustainability, to adapt to changing demands and challenges. Liquid cooling is one such innovation.

According to Gartner, Liquid cooling uses a liquid, such as water, or a refrigerant, rather than air, to cool the data center. This allows the cooling solution to be brought closer to the heat source, thus requiring less, if any, fan power. Liquid cooling can solve the high-density, server-cooling problem, because liquid (conductive cooling) conducts more than 3,000 times as much heat as air and requires less energy to do so, allowing increased data center densities. Newer piping technology means the probability of leaks is extremely low.

But liquid cooling is more than just a method for cooling power-intensive servers. It’s one part of a holistic strategy that IT teams must have to navigate a new and dynamic array of market pressures. Liquid cooling won’t solve all these problems on its own; rather, it is an essential element of a high-performance data center. As AI continues to build momentum, data centers designed around efficiency and sustainability have a fundamental advantage.

A Wave of Change for the Data Center Industry
The data center industry has seen sweeping changes in recent years. Several trends have put growing pressure on the industry, including:

• The explosive growth of data, which has become a critical resource gives enterprises a competitive advantage
• A resulting surge in compute-intensive workloads from AI, high-performance computing (HPC), etc., that require more processing power
• The need to increase data center densities while balancing space constraints
• Concerns about utility power supply and cost
• New sustainability imperatives and the shift to satisfy power demand with renewable energy
• Edge computing, which requires more processing power distributed to more places
• Increasing regulation of the data center environment, including around data center efficiencies

Regulations and voluntary standards like Singapore’s (SS) the German Energy Efficiency Bill and the Netherlands Energy Saving Obligation address things like data center operating temperatures and emissions reduction for data centers. These are just a few examples of new efficiency and sustainability requirements—and there are more on the horizon.

Some of these market pressures even conflict with

need for data and processing power, while power supply one another. Businesses have a seemingly infinite and capacity in key locations are very much finite. Digital inclusion—the idea of providing equitable access to digital technologies to everyone—fuels economic opportunity for marginalized communities, while those same communities weigh the resource impact of data center projects that bring technology closer to them.

Network and application outages can have a devastating impact on businesses and individuals, but enterprises’ budgets to invest in additional redundancy or disaster recovery measures are constrained. Regulations on sustainability and data center operating temperatures carry new complexity and cost, while governments also compete for economic growth engines. There are tremendous growth opportunities for digital capabilities within emerging markets, but serving those regions requires overcoming limitations with existing infrastructure and navigating challenging environmental factors.

Even as macroeconomic tides rise and fall, digital demand isn’t slowing down. Innovation is continually needed to help balance these forces—and liquid cooling is one way to help tackle some of the challenges of cooling high-density deployments.

The Promising Role of Liquid Cooling
Liquid cooling is revolutionizing how data centers cool the powerful high-density hardware that supports emerging technologies. It is not only a mechanism to efficiently dissipate heat from servers; it presents the opportunity to reduce the power required by eliminating the need to run server fans for air cooling. Dell Technologies reported that 18 – 23% less power is required when utilizing direct liquid cooling technologies for similar workloads.

Liquid cooling also enables a dematerialization benefit: Consolidating more compute power into fewer racks means less equipment to buy, operate, and eventually replace. Placing power-dense servers in closer proximity to each other enables more efficient use of the data center space. As each generation of chips delivers exponentially more power per rack, expanding server densities, liquid cooling is an increasingly necessary cooling mechanism.