Equinix opened its first co-innovation facility (CIF) today with the goal of helping the data center operators increase efficiency, become grid-positive, and reach the environmental targets necessary to combat climate change.

The CIF's main areas of focus are direct-to-chip cooling, clean hydrogen fuel-cell power, and overall energy efficiency. "Thanks to the work we’re doing with partners at the CIF, we’re continuing to make significant advancements in the way we design, build and operate our global platform, with high-energy efficiency standards as a priority,” Raouf Abdel, Equinix EVP of global operations, said in a statement.

The facility, located in Equinix's DC15 data center campus, brings together partners ZutaCore, Bloom Energy, Virtual Power Systems (VPS), and Natron Energy to develop new tech for cooling and powering data centers while keeping the carbon footprint as small as possible.

Equinix hopes to deploy the tech developed in the CIF throughout its data centers over the next couple of years, Sustainability Director Jennifer Ruch told SDxCentral in an interview. These sustainable developments will likely merge into the broader data center industry as well, she added.

One of the most prominent sustainability challenges data centers face is cooling, and there are two main approaches to mitigating this issue: immersion cooling, where racks of servers are immersed in a chemical bath for cooling purposes, and direct-to-chip cooling, where liquids are pumped to cold plates attached to CPUs, GPUs, and memory.

Equinix partnered with ZutaCore to further develop its direct-to-chip, waterless cooling technology. Compared to other sustainable cooling methods, ZutaCore's is "much more elegant, much simpler to deploy, [and] much simpler to maintain," ZutaCore President Udi Paret told SDxCentral. It also scales easily and can be deployed in both brownfield and greenfield data centers, Paret added.

Liquid cooling also presents a viable market opportunity. Dell'Oro Group analyst Lucas Beran expects the liquid cooling market to grow 25% in 2022 to reach $141 million, despite supply chain constraints. And as momentum continues to build, an inflection point for liquid cooling adoption grows ever closer, he explained.

CIF partner Bloom Energy is chasing a vision of data centers powered not by generators and uninterrupted power supplies (UPS), but by onsite, solid-oxide fuel cells that generate cleaner energy. The company claims the fuel cells have the potential to push fossil fuel-powered generators into obsolescence.

Beran expects fuel cells to gain traction this year, but he's doubtful there will be much concrete progress for the tech in 2022.

Of particular interest is Equinix's work with Vertiv and other utility, fuel cell, and research partners, funded by the Europe-based Clean Hydrogen Partnership, to develop a proof-of-concept fuel cell for data center environments. As part of this initiative, Vertiv will provide a 100 kilowatt (kW) fuel cell module with an integrated UPS by 2023.

Equinix's fuel cell efforts through the CIF and the Clean Hydrogen Partnership are interconnected, Ruch said. The Clean Hydrogen Partnership will enable the vendor to showcase a small demonstration of clean hydrogen used in a data center environment. On the CIF side, Bloom Energy's non-hydrogen-enabled fuel-cell tech will highlight the ability to eliminate generators for certain sizes of compute load, she added.

"We definitely want to showcase that we can use fuel cells while we're still undergoing the hydrogen transition," she added.

Other projects underway include Natron Energy's battery energy storage and VPS' software-defined power platforms, which manage power draw and minimize power stranding. The companies claim the technology could improve data center energy efficiency by 30-50%.

Equinix also plans to use the CIF to explore heat reuse technology related to data center cooling. High-grade heat collected from data centers via liquid cooling can be redistributed for district heating of places like swimming pools or schools, Ruch explained.

This taps into the idea of a circular economy, which is often seen as the end goal for a truly sustainable society. "These different technologies all fit together into one circular economy package that we want to promote as an industry," she said.

Going forward, the DC15 CIF is one of many sustainability pilots Equinix hopes to be part of, Ruch said, which is a trend partially driven by the need to create a business case for sustainable developments. "Innovation and sustainability are really interlinked at this point, and how we're creating value in the future is going to be related to how we can commercialize new technologies."