UK modular data center firm Sonic Edge has partnered with cooling specialist Icetope to launch liquid-cooled modules.

The Iceotope AI Pods incorporate Iceotope’s Precision Liquid Cooling technology and are optimized for the increased compute densities required for AI, said Sonic Edge.

The pods are multi-tenant micro data centers (MDCs) measuring 12m by 4m with power capacity of up to 450kW.

Sonic Edge said the pods can be deployed both on-premise and in remote locations. The design also includes UPS backup, fire suppression, monitoring, and evaluation.

The companies said Iceotope’s precision liquid cooling technology can reduce energy consumption by up to 40 percent, carbon emissions by up to 40 percent, and water usage by up to 96 percent.

Stuart Priest, founder and CEO at Sonic Edge, said: “There are many organizations, particularly startups, that can’t afford to wait for colocation space to become available for their operations. They are looking to get their own high-performance, AI-ready MDCs up and running fast.”

“To build and get a data center up and running can take five or six years, whereas with an AI Pod it takes just 16 weeks from order to delivery.”

Priest added the pods are designed to grow with the project and can be adapted to suit the customer.

Founded in 2021, Sonic Edge is a provider of prefabricated and micro data centers for Edge, on-premise, and telecom applications.

Last month, Sonic Edge launched a pod designed for Bitcoin mining. In May 2023, it looked to deploy 50 modules across the country in a partnership with Deep Green. However, this deal subsequently fell through.

Iceotope was founded in 2005 and specializes in HPC computing, cooling, and modular data center infrastructure technologies. The company recently collaborated with SKT and SK Enmove on the development of AI data center liquid cooling solutions.