AI-powered computing demand is ‘fundamentally reshaping’ the role of cooling in data centres, a new whitepaper from Frost & Sullivan has said.
According to the whitepaper, entitled Strategic Cooling for the AI Era: How Data Centre Cooling Solutions Are Transforming Global Infrastructure, AI training, inference workloads, hyperscale cloud expansion, edge computing, and high-performance computing are putting pressure on data centre operators, with cooling increasingly moving from a background facilities function to front and centre.
Data centre efficiency
“Cooling is no longer simply a facilities issue – it is becoming central to data centre efficiency, uptime resilience, and sustainable digital growth in the AI era,” commented Monica Miches, Industrial Advisory Director at Frost & Sullivan.
“As AI workloads continue to intensify, operators must rethink cooling not as an operational afterthought, but as a core strategic component of digital infrastructure design.”
The report examines how data centre operators are embracing more efficient cooling systems to boost performance, scalability, and long-term competitiveness, as well as improve sustainability and operational resilience.
This includes growing adoption of liquid cooling and direct-to-chip architectures, as well as higher-capacity coolant distribution units (CDUs), and next-generation thermal management strategies to support AI infrastructure deployments.
Allied to this, investment in reliability engineering, leak management, and redundancy-by-design is becoming increasingly important, as is the growing influence of sustainability and water stewardship on cooling strategy.
Emerging technologies
Emerging technologies discussed in the report include two-phase cooling systems, microchannel architectures and advanced fluid management approaches – all of which are likely to gain in prominence as AI infrastructure continues to scale over the coming decade.
“As AI infrastructure begins to resemble industrial-scale thermal systems rather than traditional IT environments, the competitive landscape will increasingly favour organisations capable of aligning cooling architecture with long-term operational, financial, and environmental objectives,” added Prem Shanmugam, VP and global practice area leader at Frost & Sullivan. Read more here.
