As AI adoption accelerates, demands on data center infrastructure are reaching new extremes. In this session, Brandon Peterson, SVP of Business Development at CoolIT Systems, will explore how the exponential growth of AI workloads, global capacity expansion, and rising processor TDPs are converging to push thermal management beyond the limits of air cooling.

Once reserved for high-performance computing, direct liquid cooling (DLC) has become a critical enabler of performance, efficiency, and scalability in next-generation AI data centers. But what lessons from DLC’s past are shaping its future? And what barriers remain as the industry moves toward broader adoption?

This session will trace DLC’s evolution from supercomputers in the 1970s to today’s enterprise-ready solutions and examine how the industry’s 2024 “learning period” is paving the way for mainstream deployment. Attendees will gain insight into the technological shifts driving DLC maturity, what lies ahead as rack densities exceed 1MW and CPUs enter the liquid-cooled era, and why liquid cooling is no longer optional.