Cooling the Future

While data centers have significantly increased in notability and number over the past 10 years, the world’s current facilities are not adequate to meet the unprecedented demand we are seeing for High-Performance Computing. Fuelled by innovation in innovative and exciting realms including Generative AI, data centers are evolving… and at pace.

Amidst this competitive time, sourcing the latest generation chips is top priority for all key players in the market. However, as the industry gravitates towards these cutting-edge GPUs, new challenges emerge, ranging from thermal management to operational support.

The Liquid-Cooling Revolution

Getting your hands on the highly sought after chips is the first hurdle to overcome. However, where they are housed and how they are looked after dictates how valuable they are. It has become increasingly obvious to the industry that best-in-class chips require state of the art temperature control, not unlike wine.

To be able to seize the opportunities presented by the future of colocation and to power next-generation HPC infrastructure, data centers increasingly choose to adopt a high-density strategy.

Packing greater power into smaller footprints, allows for more efficient use of land, optimized performance, reduced expenditure and increased scalability options. High-density environment performs much better when coupled with next-generation liquid cooling, which has significantly higher thermal transfer properties than the traditional go-to cooling solution – air.

The Design Problem

As density and liquid become integral parts of the data center landscape, not all data centers are equipped for this evolution. The industry players with a key advantage are those that can design purpose-built data centers fit to handle these new infrastructure requirements. For those companies with large, traditional data center assets, reliant on air-cooled solutions, it’s a much larger and costly task to try and adapt your existing assets to meet current and future demands than it is to strategically build your portfolio in accordance with them.

As part of Northern Data Group’s strategy, Ardent Data Centers is in the fortunate position of being able to, select, design and build facilities with these requirements in mind. Having recently announced a €110 million investment strategy to expand our ability to provide colocation services for compute power across Europe and the United States, such planned acquisitions are prime examples of our commitment to providing future ready data centers, purpose built to power the next generation of HPC.

In particular, we have selected a 41,000 square foot facility in Pittsburgh that Ardent will completely retrofit with the latest liquid cooling technology, allowing for additional power and to maximize energy capacity. As a result, the site which is currently 5 MW will be expanded to 10 MW by the beginning of 2025 and doubled again to 20 MW by year-end 2026.

Investing in the Future

Ardent’s approach to delivering on Northern Data Group’s strategy, consists, in part, of acquiring and repurposing former enterprise data centers; this approach is a testament to its forward-thinking and future-ready philosophy. By identifying facilities with untapped potential for increased power, we are able to keep capital costs in check, while also contributing to environmental sustainability through the maximization of existing resources. What’s more, we are able to bring new infrastructure to market quickly, providing a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving industry.

Another consideration is ensuring that a data center is not only technologically advanced, but also strategically positioned to serve the evolving demands of the market. It is important to recognize the importance of connectivity, power costs and proximity to a skilled workforce, while building where and when opportunities arise.

As the data center industry navigates the challenges that come with powering an era of such rapid technological innovation, the importance of embracing new technologies cannot be overstated. As such, investment in purpose-built facilities that utilize these cutting-edge solutions is key not only to addressing the immediate challenges, but to powering the next-generation HPC infrastructure that will deliver the foundations for the next frontier of innovation.

As we look to the future, and AI innovation continues at an unprecedented rate, thermoregulation technology’s crucial role continues. As an industry, we should focus on evolving this technology to keep pace with innovation. The world is already faced with some pretty serious environmental challenges. Ironically, cooling data centers correctly might be one of the many ways we can ensure the world doesn’t continue to heat up!