F E A T U R E

Nick Maggs, Managing Director Hard Services at OCS, makes the case that AI ' s greatest data centre threat isn ' t computing power, it ' s the ageing cooling infrastructure quietly running underneath it.

uch of the discussion around Artificial

Intelligence and data centres places focus on computing power. We hear about new processors, larger servers and facilities designed to handle far more information than ever before. What receives far less attention, however, is the physical infrastructure that allows all this equipment to operate safely, particularly cooling.

For many data centres, the greatest challenge is not the arrival of AI in recent years, but the condition of the systems already in place. Heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment installed years ago is now being asked to support workloads it was never designed to carry. These systems may still be operating, but the margin for error has narrowed considerably.

AI has not created a new problem but has instead brought existing weaknesses to the surface, exposing the limits of ageing plant that has been kept running through repair rather than replacement.

What has changed inside data centres

To understand why cooling is under strain, it helps to look at what modern data centres now contain. AI workloads

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