Equinix to expand liquid cooling to Australian data centres

Equinix has announced plans to expand support for liquid cooling technologies to over 100 of its international business exchange (IBX) data centres worldwide, including those in Sydney and Melbourne.

The company said the expansion will enable more businesses to use cooling technologies to support compute-intensive workloads like artificial intelligence (AI).

Equinix will roll out technologies to more than 45 metros worldwide, including London, Silicon Valley, Singapore and Washington D.C.

Support for the technologies will add to the liquid-to-air cooling, provided through in-rack heat exchangers, at nearly every IBX today.

“We have seen an increase in demand for data-intensive and high-compute applications like AI,” IDC's research director for cloud to edge datacentre trends Sean Graham said.

“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."

"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.”

Equinix will support major liquid cooling technologies like direct-to-chip and rear-door heat exchangers and offer a vendor-neutral approach so customers can choose their preferred hardware provider.

Direct-to-chip involves a cold plate sitting on top of the chip inside the server that 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.

Rear-door heat exchangers use a cooling coil and fans to capture heat from air cooled IT equipment and are mounted directly onto customer cabinets.

“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,” the company's VP of global colocation Tiffany Osias 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.”