Air-assisted liquid cooling is shaping up to be the star of the data center industry in 2024, and colocation data center provider Aligned is betting on its cooling technology to provide a more sustainable and scalable solution than legacy data center cooling. This move comes as high-performance computing (HPC), machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads are deployed in droves – often before effective cooling technologies can be put in place.

Aligned’s patent-pending DeltaFlow liquid cooling technology, announced earlier this week, combines a cooling distribution unit (CDU) and a heat exchanger in one unit. DeltaFlow provides direct-to-chip (DTC) cooling with a closed-loop water system and works best in conjunction with Aligned’s Delta3  cooling technology, which covers the rest of the data center infrastructure’s thermal management needs, Aligned CTO Phill Lawson-Shanks told SDxCentral.

The Delta3 and DeltaFlow combination is expected to help Aligned gain traction in the growing data center thermal management market. “Delta3 has been tremendously successful for the customers who want to have that future-proofing,” he said.

With traditional data center air cooling, the cooling technology needs to be laid out to optimize the coldest parts of the room. In a 6,000 square foot room with the typical cracks and crevices running 1 MW of computing capacity, there are likely 16 rows of 16 cabinets, or 256 cabinets. Each cabinet may average 6.5 KW of energy consumption, but the cabinets in the middle are running closer to 25 KW with the edges at 3 KW. “That’s the normal,” Lawson-Shanks said.

Aligned’s Delta liquid cooling technology, however, can run those same 256 servers in a 2,000 square feet room – a third of the size. “We can have 1 MW over 20 cabinets,” he said. “The consequence of that is our customers use less material, they use less racks, they use less networking, cabling and copper. As a sustainability model, it’s very efficient. And as a scaling model, it’s much more efficient for our clients.”

Up until recently, 50 KW of power has been plenty to run general purpose compute. But as CEOs continue to push the importance of integrating AI, it’s a different ball game. HPC, like what’s required for AI applications, consumes much more energy than standard cloud computing.

Once the decision is made to use AI, IT teams have to “look at the technology. They have to do the budgeting for the hardware. And then they have to find out where they’re going to place it. And once they determine the amount of power required for these new technology platforms, and then the cooling required, they're going to start looking at data center providers, and very, very few can do up to 50 KW, if at all – certainly not in a very energy efficient way,” Lawson-Shanks said.

Aligned touts an “extremely low” power use effectiveness (PUE) score, “which is another part of our philosophy,” he said. “Our expand-on-demand philosophy is: You start where you are, you grow as you need to and our systems will accommodate your additional growth requirements – whether it's space, power or cooling.”

Lawson-Shanks highlighted air-assisted liquid cooling as the next big turning point in the evolution of data center cooling.

“Everyone is very excited – from the customers and the OEMs, the server manufacturers and the chip manufacturers – because we're one of the very few out there that can service the needs of today and tomorrow,” he said.

That excitement comes in part from the data center provider’s work with major ecosystem players. “We’re working with anyone that is producing high-performance compute technologies … in their labs, as well as the various chip manufacturers, the GPU manufacturers and others,” he said. “It’s just part and parcel. You have to understand what’s going on to accommodate it.”

Aligned is also part of the Open Compute Project (OCP), where it’s working with leading data center hardware vendors to develop the next generation of rack that supports increasingly mature liquid cooling technologies.

This collaboration helps Aligned know what’s being produced so it can figure out “how to couple into their infrastructure,” Lawson-Shanks said. “The beauty of DeltaFlow is it really doesn’t matter what’s on the floor – whether it’s directly to the chip individually, or it’s into a rack that feeds the chips, or if it’s the whole rack to a rear-door heat exchanger or whatever comes next – we just plug into it according to whatever methodology they require.”