Liquid cooling is now part of every high-density design conversation, but the future data hall is unlikely to be all liquid. Today’s GPU racks still reject much of their heat to air, support cabinets rarely need liquid at all, and most new AI capacity is going into facilities that were never built for it. The real design question is how to build a hall that handles both air and liquid, and keeps working as the mix changes with each GPU generation. This episode will explore:
- Whether the all-liquid data center is a realistic end state, and what stays on air even in liquid-cooled clusters
- How to design for air today and liquid tomorrow without replacing infrastructure mid-project
- How to protect the asset and contain risk once liquid is in the white space
- What a typical data hall could look like by 2030
