Liquid Cooling, AI Data Centers, and the Cyber-Threat Landscape

One of the main reasons so many people attend Data Center World is to hear about the latest technologies and trends that are changing the data center. This year’s Emerging IT & Data Center Technologies track delivers an impressive array of speakers who will let attendees in on what’s hot, which breakthroughs have the most substance, and which ones remain largely in the hype category.  

One of the hottest areas is data center cooling. The profile of liquid cooling has been elevated over the past couple of years due to AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads becoming mainstream.  

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) took note. It announced federal funding in 2022 as part of the COOLERCHIPS program. Many organizations applied but only 15 were selected. Program Director Peter de Bock set ambitious targets for participating vendors and academic institutions: Develop revolutionary cooling solutions that enable high-power-density AI and chipsets—and reduce cooling energy and water usage by over 90%. The goal is to lower total cooling energy expenditure to less than 5% of a typical data center’s IT load at any time and in any U.S. location for a high-density compute system.  

De Bock spoke at last year’s Data Center World. He’s back again in 2025 and will showcase real progress in the attainment of program goals during his session, “Hot Data, Cool Solutions: ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS Efficiency for Next Generation (AI) Data Centers.”

“AI training and inferencing compute needs are pushing for ever larger and more energy dense racks in the 100 kW to 250 kW per rack range,” said de Bock. “The transformational cooling technologies developed under the COOLERCHIPS program are focused on reducing cooling energy by 90% and significant progress is being made.”  

For the first 18 months of the program, there was some pushback from participants on the idea of racks in excess of 100 Kw. This was seen as not only high, but perhaps beyond the bounds of achievability. How things have changed over the past year.  

“The new reality is that NVIDIA NV72-basedservers offer around 120kW/rack,” said de Bock.“Further, rack densities are being explored that will exceed this.”  

15 teams continue to work on ARPA-E’s $42 million COOLERCHIPS program. They span top technologists from industry giants like NVIDIA, Intel, IBM, and Vertiv, as well as leading universities and innovative small businesses. They are designing and testing next-generation cooling systems that exceed the reliability of traditional air cooling, without requiring inordinate amounts of maintenance and without breaking the bank.  

“The AI compute challenge is different as multiple nodes have to collaboratively work on a single solution forcing a high energy density and therefore resetting the power delivery and cooling paradigm,” said de Bock.  

For Data Center World 2025, de Bock has formed a panel consisting of leading teams from the program who will unveil their cutting-edge advancements and share progress on these state-of-the-art technologies with the show’s audience. Attendees can hear directly from them on the latest breakthroughs and when they can expect to see their work bearing fruit in the form of commercially available cooling systems. The panelists will be announced in the coming weeks. 

This ARPA-E panel is only one part of our extensive Emerging IT & Data Center Technologies track. Further must-see sessions include:  

• Bridging the Digital Divide: Edge Data Centers Revolutionizing Rural Education by Doug Recker, President of Duos Edge AI. He will brief attendees on how edge data centers (EDCs) operate and their role in providing high-speed connectivity and scalable IT resources in rural education settings as well as their transformative effects on educational outcomes and local economies by supporting businesses with improved connectivity and computing capabilities. “By focusing on providing scalable IT resources that seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructure, EDC solutions expand capabilities at the network edge,” said Recker.  

• Is DLC Worth All the Hype?Raymond Parpart, Director of Data Center Operations & Strategy at the University of Chicago, will walk the audience through a proof-of-concept (POC) Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC) installation that rapidly moved from the POC stage into production. Parpart will showcase system performance and operational metrics as well as a comparison run on side-by-side machines running with and without DLC.  

• Security Convergence: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. Lee Marcelle, Principal Information Security Engineer at global colocation data center provider Equinix will explore the critical aspects of data center security and present strategies and innovations to enhance its effectiveness. This session will cover the key security challenges faced by data centers including physical breaches, network vulnerabilities, insider threats, and emerging cyber threats.  

Attend these sessions and many others on the latest advances in cooling and data center technology at Data Center World 2025. Register today.