The digital infrastructure company today announced plans to expand support for advanced liquid cooling technology to more than 100 of its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres in more than 45 metros around the world.
The new deployments include direct-to-chip liquid cooling and will support Equinix's existing offering which includes liquid-to-air cooling, through in-rack heat exchangers.
Equinix said the expansion will enable more businesses to use the most performant cooling technologies for the powerful, high-density hardware that supports compute-intensive workloads like 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 datacentre Trends at the International Data Corporation.
Graham said the hardware required to run these new applications is pushing up densities inside data centres, which 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 centre providers, like Equinix, can support this next generation of cooling solutions," he said.
The deployments will take place in Equinix locations that include London, Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Washington DC.
The technology will be made available through Platform Equinix which provides direct access to its ecosystem of partners.
"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 Tiffany Osias, vice president of global colocation at 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 centre capacity to support the complex, modern IT deployments that applications like AI require," Osias said.
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.
