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.”[1]
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 in order 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 change in recent years. Several trends have put growing pressure on the industry, including:
- The explosive growth of data, which has become a critical resource giving enterprises 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) 697:2023,[2] the German Energy Efficiency Bill[3] and the Netherlands Energy Saving Obligation[4] 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 one another. Businesses have a seemingly infinite need for data and processing power, while power supply 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[5].
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.
Lastly, liquid cooling introduces new possibilities in navigating industry standards for data center operating temperatures as enterprises seek infrastructure that will reliably scale within broader temperature ranges.
The future of high-performance data centers
Liquid cooling is just one of the tools we have available to address new power, cooling and hardware efficiency requirements as we design for the next era of data center infrastructure. The data center of the future will balance reliability and sustainability needs, be optimized for customer requirements, and offer the flexibility to meet today’s market demands.
Market pressures will continue to evolve, but the need for efficiency and innovation will always push data center providers to serve their customers in new ways. Liquid cooling supports wider data center operating temperatures and more efficient energy use, as well as addressing space constraints in high-density data center deployments.
At Equinix, we’ve made a range of environmental commitments, and we’re continually working to design high-performance data centers that take advantage of the latest innovations in data center design.
- We’ve committed to achieving 100% renewable energy coverage globally by 2030 and have made strong progress toward that goal, with 96% renewables coverage globally in 2023.
- Our operational strategies strive to optimize the use of resources with maximum efficiency through operating at the most efficient temperatures and optimizing water use, for example. We also avoid using water for cooling in water-stressed regions.
- We’re applying institutional expertise in data center design on capabilities like heat reuse—a practice that involves capturing recovered heat and using it for other purposes, such as heating buildings, greenhouses and swimming pools (notably, the Olympic training pool). Liquid cooling enables effective heat reuse by delivering higher quality and higher temperature heat that can easily be recovered and transported.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Similarly, the ability to balance competing pressures requires a thoughtful vision for accelerating into the future while steadily navigating current constraints.
Regulations eventually act as forcing functions, but leading companies are constantly innovating and exploring technologies and partnerships well in advance. With the right infrastructure strategy and data center provider, navigating these dynamic variables can, in fact, deliver a strategic advantage—optimizing growth potential, limiting risk and optimizing costs.
For many workloads and applications, HPC enabled by liquid cooling is likely to become one of many must-have infrastructure components for tackling these new market pressures and staying competitive in today’s digital world.
Learn more about liquid cooling at Equinix by downloading the solution brief.
[1] Gartner IT Glossary Terms, “Liquid Cooling,” as of August 22, 2024.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
[2] SS 697:2023, Singapore Standards.
[3] Germany passes Energy Efficiency Act, with data center restrictions, Data Center Dynamics, September 20, 2023.
[4] What is the Energy Saving Obligation? Netherlands Enterprise Agency, April 29, 2024.
[5] Diving Deep into the Liquid Server Cooling Choices, Dell Technologies, May 3, 2024.
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