Equinix to deploy liquid cooling tech in over 100 global data centres

Equinix, a global leader in digital infrastructure, has announced its intention to extend support for high-performing liquid cooling technologies to over 100 of its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres worldwide. The upgrade will cover over 45 metro areas, including Sydney and Melbourne, and follows the company's current offering backing liquid-to-air cooling via in-rack heat exchangers across the majority of their IBX locations.

The move will facilitate businesses to employ the most efficient cooling technologies for powerful, dense hardware that underpins compute-intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI). Sean Graham, Research Director, Cloud to Edge Datacentre Trends at IDC, shared: "We have 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...it is essential that data centre providers, like Equinix, can support this next generation of cooling solutions."

Equinix's strategy aligns with the Australian Government's 2021 Digital Economy Strategy, which inspires the adoption and development of trusted digital technology. It also acknowledges the influential role of emergent technologies in positioning Australia at the vanguard of technology development and usage.

Equinix will commercialise support of direct-to-chip liquid cooling in over 45 metros, including Sydney, Melbourne, London, Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Washington D.C. In keeping its promise to empower digital leaders with evolving their next-generation liquid-cooled designs, Equinix is also offering a vendor-neutral approach allowing customers to choose their preferred hardware provider in their deployments.

Equinix acknowledges the revolutionary impact liquid cooling is having on how data centres are cooled, especially those supporting emerging technologies. Tiffany Osias, Vice President of Global Colocation at Equinix, said: "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."

Equinix packages major liquid cooling technologies, including direct-to-chip and rear-door heat exchangers, allowing customers to take advantage of the most efficient solutions. In terms of advanced cooling techniques, Equinix supports various methods, including a direct-to-chip style and rear-door heat exchangers. Partners and customers have shown excitement at Equinix's data centre cooling expansion. Steve Walton, CEO of CoolIT Systems Inc. praised Equinix's environment, citing that it provides an ideal canvas for customers to deploy cutting-edge CoolIT Systems liquid-cooling technologies.

"Like Equinix's technology and vendor-neutral approach, our goal was to create an open standard that can fit any 19" 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," said My Truong, SSIA Chairperson and Field CTO for Equinix.