Equinix has announced plans to expand support for advanced liquid cooling technologies—like direct-to-chip—to more than 100 of its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers in more than 45 metros around the world. This builds on Equinix’s existing offering that supports liquid-to-air cooling, through in-rack heat exchangers, at nearly every IBX today. This expansion will enable more businesses to use the most performant cooling technologies for the powerful, high-density hardware that supports compute-intensive workloads like artificial intelligence (AI).
“We have seen an increase in demand for data-intensive and high-compute applications like AI,” said Sean Graham, Research Director, Cloud to Edge Datacenter Trends at IDC. “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. 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.”
With commercialized support of direct-to-chip liquid cooling in more than 45 metros—including London, Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Washington D.C.—customers can deploy advanced liquid cooling solutions against mission-critical needs in the markets that matter most to them. Equinix provides direct access to the ecosystem of partners and providers of Platform Equinix®. By continuing this approach Equinix is committed to empowering digital leaders with the ability to evolve their next-generation liquid-cooled designs.
“Liquid cooling is revolutionizing how data centers 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, 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 organizations innovate data center capacity to support the complex, modern IT deployments that applications like AI require.”
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. Additionally, Equinix is offering a vendor-neutral approach to enable customers to use their preferred hardware provider in their deployments.
Direct-to-chip is a unique approach that 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 are able to manage higher cooling loads than conventional cooling.
