Equinix has launched a global network of innovation centres for enterprises testing liquid-cooled infrastructure, with sites in Frankfurt, London, Osaka, Paris and Sydney.
The centres, called Equinix Enhanced Performance Innovation Centres, are designed to let companies test production-ready liquid cooling environments inside live Equinix data centres before wider deployment.
The initiative targets enterprises building high-density AI infrastructure, as more powerful GPU and CPU systems increase rack densities and drive demand for liquid cooling. Many organisations still lack experience integrating cooling, power, networking and facility operations in a single environment.
Each site allows customers to work with Equinix specialists and hardware partners to assess integrated liquid cooling systems under field conditions. The centres also support testing of AI training and inference workloads in operating data centre environments.
The model is intended to help customers identify infrastructure and operational issues before production. Enterprises can use the sites to understand how liquid cooling technologies fit specific environments and answer operational questions ahead of deployment.
Testing infrastructure
The launch expands a broader Equinix effort to provide testing and validation spaces for customers and partners. The company opened its first Co-Innovation Facility in 2022 for partner collaboration on new technology before deployment in Equinix data centres, and later introduced Solution Validation Centres for customers reviewing distributed deployments.
Liquid cooling has become a more prominent issue for data centre operators and enterprise IT teams as AI workloads move beyond pilot stages. Higher-density compute systems place greater demands on cooling and power design, prompting operators to examine whether existing air-cooled setups are sufficient for newer hardware.
For enterprises, the challenge is often practical rather than theoretical. Deploying liquid-cooled systems requires coordination across several layers of infrastructure, from the hardware platform itself to networking, power distribution and the building environment in which the equipment runs.
Enterprise demand
"Liquid cooling is an essential component of modern enterprise infrastructure and a hard requirement for customers deploying AI," said Brian Stein, Senior Vice President, Infrastructure Products and Services at Equinix.
"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," added Stein.
The centres are intended to let enterprise teams test infrastructure in the same type of live environment in which it will ultimately operate. Customers can review how different parts of the stack interact before making long-term investment decisions.
Criteo's experience
One early user cited by Equinix was ad technology group Criteo, which has been assessing liquid cooling as part of its distributed AI infrastructure planning.
"Liquid cooling was new territory for us, so we built our confidence step by step," said Matthieu Blumberg, Senior Vice President of Engineering Infrastructure, Security, Internal IT & CISO at Criteo. "Our AI runs across a distributed footprint, and the infrastructure must perform the same way wherever it sits. We saw how liquid cooling performed in practice, learned what it took to run it well, and then committed to scale. Equinix was with us at every stage, with the expertise and the live environment to prove it out first. That's what turned liquid cooling from an open question into a core part of our distributed AI infrastructure."
Equinix expects to open more EPIC locations in 2027.