Equinix has launched liquid cooling environments across five of its operating data centres, aiming to support enterprise trials of high-density AI infrastructure.
Known as the Equinix Enhanced Performance Innovation Centers (EPIC), the facilities are currently operating in London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, and Osaka, with additional locations scheduled to open in 2027.
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The installations allow organisations to run trial workloads on liquid-cooled central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware alongside original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
By evaluating AI training and inference workloads inside functioning data centres, engineering teams can examine how liquid cooling stacks integrate with existing infrastructure.
Technical staff from Equinix assist users during testing to identify facility, mechanical, and operational constraints prior to full commercial deployment.
The move responds to escalating rack densities within data centres, where advanced computing platforms demand specialised heat dissipation.
Unifying liquid cooling, electrical power, network connections, and ongoing facility management remains difficult for many enterprises, and an operational issue in any single area can disrupt or delay an entire project as AI applications transition from trials into live operation.
Equinix infrastructure products and services senior vice-president Brian Stein said: “Liquid cooling is an essential component of modern enterprise infrastructure and a hard requirement for customer’s deploying AI. EPIC provides businesses with a place to test, validate and build with confidence before they commit to large-scale deployments.
“We’re putting our global infrastructure footprint and unmatched ecosystem to work to accelerate the path from concept to production for our customers.”
The new facilities build on earlier testing sites operated by the data centre provider. Equinix established its Co-Innovation Facility in 2022 to collaborate with technology partners on evaluating new equipment before introducing it to live data centres.
The company subsequently introduced Solution Validation Centers in 2024 to assist customers with validating infrastructure setups across distributed operating environments.
Prior to this, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) and Equinix closed their previously announced $4bn acquisition of atNorth, a Nordic data centre developer and operator.
