Equinix has deployed support for direct liquid cooling (DLC) in more than 45 of its International Business Exchange (IBX) data center markets, with the first sites coming online early next year. The move, following the colocation data center provider's initial liquid-cooled deployment last year at a facility in Virginia, shows the company's leadership in this growing market segment.

"Equinix has been a leader in liquid cooling for several years – actively developing and providing the infrastructure that enables liquid-cooled deployments," Equinix VP of Global Colocation Services Tiffany Osias told SDxCentral. "Today, customers have active liquid cooling deployments in IBX facilities across several metros, with even more coming online in Q1 2024," she said.

While Equinix provides the plumbing, access to water and temperature control necessary for liquid cooling, customers bring their own liquid cooling technology to the data center. This "vendor-neutral approach allows customers to use their preferred hardware provider in their deployments," Osias said.

Improving thermal management also contributes to corporate sustainability performance by positively impacting overall data center efficiency. For example, liquid cooling requires fewer electric fans, which decreases the amount of power needed for cooling and optimizes IT efficiency, she explained.

Liquid cooling also better supports circular economy principles like heat recovery and reuse, compared to traditional methods of air-cooling. "Liquid cooling allows us to preserve heat more effectively in the facility loop or export heat to the community where it is feasible to be used for other purposes where heat is an asset – comfort heating, for example," Osias said.

The rise of AI is heating up data centers, but the infrastructure required to sustainably cool down and distribute energy to high-performance servers hasn't quite caught up to the software innovation side of AI.

Data center operators are beginning to explore alternatives to traditional data center cooling because "the hardware required to run these new applications is pushing up densities inside data centers and can no longer be efficiently cooled by traditional techniques," IDC Research Director Sean Graham said. "We are seeing a growing demand for liquid-cooled solutions from enterprises, and it is essential that data center providers like Equinix can support this next generation of cooling solutions."

AI workloads necessitate high power consumption at the rack level, which generates more heat than standard data center infrastructure, Dell'Oro Group Research Director Lucas Beran told SDxCentral. Currently, data center operators can support about 20 kW of power density per rack using air-cooling, but managing AI infrastructure "at scale with cost, efficiency and sustainability in mind will require transitioning from air to liquid cooling," he said.

Despite the relatively small size of the liquid cooling market, it’s "growing fast," Beran said. "The biggest inhibitor here is the lack of operational readiness for data center operators to incorporate liquid cooling in their data center designs. To overcome this, data center operators are deploying AI infrastructure in existing facilities, but with low rack utilization."

As an alternate solution, data center operators "may also retrofit existing facilities with air-assisted liquid cooling, such as a rear door heat exchanger or direct liquid cooling (DLC) with heat rejection at the back of the rack, into a hot aisle."

DLC is beginning to emerge as a leading thermal management solution and boasts early momentum and ecosystem support. Form factor is the biggest characteristic driving DLC’s early success because "it utilizes existing vertical rack infrastructure that end-users are familiar operating," Beran said.

"It’s also worth noting that DLC has been utilized in the HPC industry for a number of years, so there are already best practices learned there that can be applied to the growing number of DLC deployments," he added. "The transition from air to liquid cooling will be an evolution, not an overnight revolution. However, for early adopters, it will drive the best performance and economics for the coming wave of AI IT infrastructure."