UK and Nordic provider Verne Global has introduced liquid cooling at its underground Finnish data center campus.

Working with Dell and Intel, Verne is offering direct liquid cooling (DLC) for systems installed in the Rock data center, which occupies ex-military tunnels in the bedrock at Pori, some 200km from Helsinki.

The Rock was created by Finnish provider Ficolo, along with facilities in Helsinki and Tampere. Ficolo was bought by UK investor Digital 9 in 2022, and then merged with D9's other acquisition Verne. Another D9 property, Volta, was also merged into Verne.

D9 has this month sold Verne Global itself to Ardian following financial struggles.

Verne says it has introduced liquid cooling to enable it to fully support the current surge in high-density systems, that generate a lot of heat.   

"The surge in AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing is amplifying the need for robust data center cooling solutions," said Kim Gunnelius, managing director of Verne Global Finland in a blog. "At a time when increasing energy efficiency is paramount for most data center operators, the average data center commits 40 percent of its energy consumption to cooling its infrastructure. The network demands of the AI models also require a significantly higher level of computational density, putting further strains on conventional air-cooling technologies. As a result, liquid cooling is quickly gaining traction in the market."

The deployment uses Dell DLC3000 systems, with 4th Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors, going up to 80kW of power per rack. Dell and Intel collaborated to add DLC, a first for Dell in Finlan, according to Gunnelius.