The shift to high-density, liquidcooled infrastructure

AI workloads are breaking the cooling mould and pushing rack power densities to new norms. Current rack densities can range from 40 kW to well over 100 kW, which is impractical to manage with air cooling. Demands continue to climb quickly with each new generation of GPU-accelerated servers. Today’ s fully populated NVIDIA-based GPU racks draw around 132 kW and that number is set to rise. The next generation, expected within a year, is projected to reach 240 kW per rack and the industry is already preparing for future power densities of 1 MW per rack.

Unlike standard Central Processing Units( CPUs), the Graphics Processing Units( GPUs) and other AI accelerators that power these AI models generate intense, concentrated heat loads that require targeted, highly efficient cooling to maintain optimal performance.

AI is a full-scale, unstoppable energy revolution set to continue as demand climbs at lightning speed. According to the International Energy Agency, projections suggest data centres could account for approximately 3 % of total global electricity

consumption by 2030, nearly doubling their current share and growing four times faster than the growth of total electricity consumption from all other sectors.

That kind of power is bringing heat like never before, and it’ s a thermal challenge that legacy data centres weren’ t built to handle. Traditional air cooling, the longtime workhorse of data centres, is being pushed to its practical limits by highperformance, high-density racks. To unlock AI’ s full potential, data centres must move beyond the status quo and embrace next-generation liquid cooling.

This is where liquid cooling becomes mission critical. Impressively, direct liquid cooling is up to 3,000 times more effective and more efficient at removing

heat than air. Why? Because it captures heat directly at the chip-level.

Liquid cooling at scale: The sustainability equation

Air cooling has been the standard in data centres for decades, but as workloads continue to grow, liquid cooling is

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