Equinix to simplify liquid cooling and power enterprise AI
Equinix is seeking to support direct-to-chip liquid cooling to power compute-intensive workloads like artificial intelligence (AI).
The global digital infrastructure company has announced plans to expand its support for advanced liquid cooling technologies (ie. direct-to-chip) to more than 100 of its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres in more than 45 metros around the world.
This offering hopes to build upon Equinix’s existing infrastructure that supports liquid-to-air cooling through in-rack heat exchangers. The expansion aims to enable more businesses to use the most performant cooling technologies for the powerful, high-density hardware that supports AI.
The growing demand for liquid-cooling services
Some of the benefits to liquid-cooling are that it ultimately works to offer better performance whilst simultaneously saving energy. As a result, data centres can operate more efficiently and keep up with the rate of digital transformations - especially when it comes to computing advancements.
The data centre sector has seen a dramatic increase in demand for data-intensive and high-compute applications such as AI throughout 2023. As a result, there is a higher demand for data centres to support liquid-cooling solutions for businesses.
With commercialised support of direct-to-chip liquid cooling in more than 45 metros, including London, Silicon Valley, Singapore and Washington DC, Equinix customers can deploy advanced liquid cooling solutions against mission-critical needs in the markets that matter most to them. As a result, Equinix hopes to continue empowering digital leaders with the ability to evolve their next-generation liquid-cooled designs.
“Liquid cooling is revolutionising how data centres cool powerful, high-density hardware that supports emerging technologies, and Equinix is at the heart of that innovation,” said Tiffany Osias, Vice President of Global Colocation at Equinix. “We have been helping businesses with significant liquid-cooled deployments across a range of deployment sizes and densities for years.
“Equinix has the experience and expertise to help organisations innovate data centre capacity to support the complex, modern IT deployments that applications like AI require.”
Enabling the customer to decide on preferred hardware
Equinix supports major liquid cooling technologies, including direct-to-chip and rear-door heat exchangers so that customers can take advantage of the most efficient solutions. With this in mind, the company is also offering a vendor-neutral approach to enable customers to use their preferred hardware provider in their deployments.
As compute power becomes increasingly available, businesses will be able to better leverage new technologies like AI with lower hardware and software costs. The aim of this is to drive further innovation and business progress. With AI being leveraged for cooling systems, Equinix also wants to cut energy usage by 48% by optimising the energy supply needed to cool the data centre infrastructure.
"Liquid cooling was front and centre in our development of the Open19 V2 specification. The goal of the Open19 project, which operates under the Linux Foundation, was to create an open standard that can fit any 19 inch rack for server, storage, and networking,” says My Truong, SSIA Chairperson and Field CTO for Equinix.
He continues: “The project enables digital leaders to use hardware from a diverse set of vendors efficiently and sustainably in any data centre environment. Equinix’s technology and vendor neutral approach to liquid cooling is a mechanism to remove the friction of deploying advanced liquid cooling solutions in enterprise data centres.”
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