Given the trajectory of processing and accelerator (e.g., GPU) design, the adoption of liquid cooling technology looks to be an inevitability. For organizations that are reluctant to retrofit their existing data center environments, colocation facilities can offer ready-to-deploy liquid-cooled infrastructure. And while colocation facilities can be an option for smaller environments, there is a larger macro-trend in hybrid cloud design that will eventually force the need to modernize data center environments with liquid cooling.

According to Enterprise Strategy Group research, 78% of organizations agreed that they prefer to run AI applications on premises. This is in part due to data locality requirements as well as concerns over public cloud costs. But largely, businesses increasingly desire to keep their most valuable workloads within the walls of their own data center environments. Assuming that desire holds true, businesses will want to ensure that they can deploy the latest, highest-performing technology on premises, which will only reinforce the need to adopt liquid-cooling on premises.

For IT decision-makers, it comes down to a strategic question: If you take a path where your data center will be a center of innovation for your organization, then doesn’t it make sense to start investigating the adoption of liquid cooling technology sooner rather than later? While Supermicro is just one of multiple server vendors with liquid-cooling options available, the effect that that liquid cooling will have on the cost, scalability, and performance of data center infrastructure moving forward reinforces the importance of evaluating all the options.