Liquid cooling is becoming an increasingly important part of high-density data center design, but that does not necessarily mean the future data hall will be entirely liquid cooled. Existing facilities, changing workload requirements and a growing range of cooling technologies mean air, containment, rear-door heat exchangers and direct-to-chip cooling could all continue to play a role. Rising rack densities and new generations of AI infrastructure are changing how operators think about the overall cooling architecture of the data hall. This episode will explore:
- Whether the all-liquid data center becomes a realistic end state
- Which cooling approaches are likely to remain mainstream as rack densities increase
- Whether 1MW per rack becomes a meaningful design target or remains an extreme use case
- What a typical data hall could actually look like by 2030
