Dive Brief:

• Aligned Data Centers has unveiled an innovation hub in Phoenix to test the advanced cooling technologies needed to support future generations of high-powered AI chips and the increasingly power-hungry server racks housing them.
• The Advanced Cooling Lab will focus on Aligned’s modular, hybrid infrastructure that can accommodate both air and liquid cooling loads, the company said in a blog post. “Liquid-ready” cooling infrastructure is a consideration for data center customers hoping to future-proof their investments as power densities increase, cooling specialists say.
• “This latest iteration of the lab is what is taking us to the next level of cooling technologies for these facilities … and how we can work with these systems to scale them,” Aligned Data Centers Chief Technology Officer Michael Welch said in a company video.

Dive Insight:

The Advanced Cooling Lab recognizes Aligned’s background as a cooling infrastructure provider dating back to the early 2010s, Welch said. 

Aligned develops modular data centers for large enterprise and hyperscale customers that it says it can deploy and scale quickly. The company maintains an “auto-replenished pool” of prefabricated, factory-built power and cooling equipment and just-in-time provisioning to avoid supply chain obstacles and meet customers’ time-to-market goals, it says. 

On the cooling front, Aligned says its Delta Cube air cooling system “dynamically adapts to customers’ IT loads” while supporting “high, mixed and variable rack densities” of 1 kW to 50 kW in the same row. It consumes less energy and water than comparable systems by “decoupl[ing] space from power,” the company says, and can run without water when needed.

Aligned says the infrastructure on display at the Advanced Cooling Lab goes farther by incorporating its DeltaFlow~ liquid cooling system alongside the Delta Cube air cooling system. The facility has “a flooded room design,” the company says. It also uses the company’s “microchannel coils, a robust structural ceiling grid and [megawatt]-scale liquid cooling loops,” which it says improves performance and efficiency while showcasing the “fungibility” of Aligned’s cooling systems. By fungibility, it means customers have flexibility to transition from liquid to air cooling as heat rejection needs increase.

The cooling lab infrastructure relies on controls developed by Divcon Controls. The Texas-based organization’s technology is in use across 100 North American data centers and itssystems can reduce end-users’ energy consumption by 15% on average, it says.

Divcon’s control systems enable liquid- and hybrid-cooled data centers “not only optimize the performance of these sophisticated systems but also enhance their efficiency, reliability, and adaptability, contributing significantly to [their] sustainability goals,” CEO Kevin Timmons said in a statement last week.

Divcon says next-generation data centers need governing systems that enable precise control over variables like coolant temperature, pressure and flow rate; integrate with mechanical assets like pumps, heat exchangers and coolant distribution units; ensure rapid adjustment to AI workloads that can rise and fall dramatically in a matter of minutes; and provide detailed visibility and predictive capabilities around system health. 

Taken together, control systems with these capabilities can reduce total cost of ownership by optimizing facility performance, reducing energy consumption and extending asset lifecycles, Divcon says.

The goal is to “enable the next generation of high-density, AI-powered data centers to operate efficiently and reliably,” Timmons said.