Businesses will benefit from the expansion, Equinix says, allowing them to use more performant cooling technologies for hardware that supports compute-intensive workloads like artificial intelligence (AI).

In a statement, Equinix explained how direct-to-chip works.

It involves a cold plate sitting on top of the chip inside the server. The cold plate is enabled with liquid supply and return channels, allowing technical cooling fluid to run through the plate, drawing heat away from the chip.

This allows direct-to-chip-enabled servers to be installed in a standard IT cabinet just like legacy air-cooled equipment, even while being cooled in an innovative way.

Rear-door heat exchangers use a cooling coil and fans to capture heat from air cooled IT equipment. They are mounted directly onto customer cabinets, so can manage higher cooling loads than conventional cooling.

IDC research director, cloud to edge data centre trends Sean Graham said IDC has seen an increase in demand for data-intensive and high compute applications like AI.

“The hardware required to run these new applications is pushing up densities inside data centres and can no longer be efficiently cooled by traditional techniques.”

With commercialised support of direct-to-chip liquid cooling in more than 45 metros, customers can deploy liquid cooling solutions against mission-critical needs in the markets that matter most to them.

“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 Equinix vice president of global colocation Tiffany Osias.

“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.”

Additionally, Equinix is offering a vendor-neutral approach to enable customers to use their preferred hardware provider in their deployments.

"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. 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,” said Equinix SSIA chairperson and field chief technology officer My Truong.

“Equinix’s state-of-the-art data centre provide an ideal environment for customers to deploy cutting edge CoolIT Systems liquid-cooling technologies, ensuring optimal resiliency, energy efficiency, and reliability for mission-critical digital infrastructure,” said CoolIT Systems CEO Steve Walton.

“ZutaCore has been partnering with Equinix at its co-innovation facility and Equinix Metal deployments to help develop, operate, and test the next generation of liquid cooling solutions at scale. We believe that liquid cooling has a critical role to play in supporting the next wave of digital infrastructure,” said ZutaCore co-founder and CEO Erez Freibach.

The deployment complements the Australian Government’s 2021 Digital Economy Strategy, which encourages the adoption and creation of trusted digital technology, and understand the important role of emerging technologies to position Australia at the forefront of technology development and use.

This first appeared in the subscription newsletter CommsWire on 12 December 2023.