Equinix opens liquid cooling test centers in five cities

Equinix launched five liquid cooling test centers on 21 October, with Frankfurt, London, Osaka, Paris and Sydney as the first sites in a network the company calls Enhanced Performance Innovation Centers (EPIC). More locations are expected to open in 2027, though Equinix did not specify where.

The centers let enterprises trial liquid-cooled GPU and CPU platforms inside live Equinix data centers before committing to large-scale AI deployments. Customers can run AI training and inference workloads under real-world conditions, with Equinix staff working alongside customer teams to surface infrastructure and operational issues before a system enters production.

Why is Equinix doing this now?

The company tied the launch to rising rack densities. More powerful GPU platforms are pushing densities up and increasing demand for liquid cooling, Equinix said. At the same time, few enterprises have the expertise to make cooling, power, networking and facility operations work together — and a gap in any one of them can stall a deployment.

Brian Stein, senior vice president of infrastructure products and services at Equinix, said liquid cooling has moved from option to prerequisite.

"Liquid cooling is an essential component of modern enterprise infrastructure and a hard requirement for customers deploying AI," Stein said. "EPIC provides businesses with a place to test, validate and build with confidence before they commit to large-scale deployments."

How does testing at an EPIC site work?

Each EPIC location operates inside a live Equinix data center rather than a lab. Customers see cooling equipment running under the same production conditions their own deployments would face and can raise operational questions with Equinix experts on site.

Customers can also work with Equinix and its ecosystem of technology partners and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to assess combined liquid cooling stacks under field conditions and see how the systems integrate. The announcement did not name the partners or OEMs participating at launch.

In short: enterprises test the exact stack they intend to run, in the environment where they intend to run it.

What came before EPIC?

EPIC builds on two earlier Equinix programs:

• 2022: Equinix announced its first Co-Innovation Facility, where partners could test new technology before it entered Equinix data centers.
• 2024: The company rolled out Solution Validation Centers, where customers validate deployments and see how Equinix supports distributed environments.

Equinix said EPIC applies the same hands-on approach to liquid cooling and high-density AI deployments.

The company has been preparing its facilities for liquid cooling for some time. In December 2023, Equinix said it would expand support for direct-to-chip liquid cooling to more than 100 of its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers across over 45 metros, including Singapore. At that point, liquid-to-air cooling through in-rack heat exchangers was already available at nearly every IBX site.

What did Criteo gain from the process?

The announcement cites Paris-based ad tech company Criteo as a customer that went through the process. Matthieu Blumberg, SVP of engineering infrastructure, security, internal IT and CISO at Criteo, said the company tested liquid cooling in stages before committing to it.

"Liquid cooling was new territory for us, so we built our confidence step by step," Blumberg said. "Our AI runs across a distributed footprint, and the infrastructure must perform the same way wherever it sits."

Blumberg said Criteo observed how liquid cooling performed in practice and learned what running it well required before deciding to scale.

"Equinix was with us at every stage, with the expertise and the live environment to prove it out first," he said. "That's what turned liquid cooling from an open question into a core part of our distributed AI infrastructure."

Where does Asia-Pacific stand?

Osaka and Sydney are the two Asia-Pacific sites in the first group of five. None of the initial EPIC locations sits in Southeast Asia, although Singapore was among the metros named in Equinix's 2023 direct-to-chip liquid cooling expansion.

Enterprises that want to visit an EPIC site can contact their Equinix account team.

Liquid cooling now gets the same prove-it-first treatment Equinix already applied to hardware and distributed deployments.