Equinix has opened a network of innovation centers in five cities to help enterprises test liquid-cooled infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI) deployments before putting systems into production.
The Equinix Enhanced Performance Innovation Centers (EPIC) are operating in Frankfurt, London, Osaka, Paris, and Sydney. Additional locations are expected to open in 2027.
The facilities allow enterprises to test high-density AI infrastructure, including liquid-cooled graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs), inside operational Equinix data centers.
The tests are designed to help companies identify potential problems with cooling, power, networking, and facility operations before committing to large-scale deployments.
The need for liquid cooling is increasing as AI workloads require more powerful processors and higher rack densities. Traditional cooling systems can face limitations as the heat generated by these systems increases, making cooling capacity a factor in deployment costs, performance, and scalability.
Through EPIC, customers can run AI training and inference workloads under real-world conditions and assess how different hardware and liquid-cooling components work together.
Equinix specialists and technology partners will assist enterprises in evaluating the systems and addressing operational issues.
“Liquid cooling is an essential component of modern enterprise infrastructure and a hard requirement for customers deploying AI,” said Brian Stein, senior vice president for infrastructure products and services at Equinix.
The initiative expands Equinix’s existing technology validation facilities. The company introduced its first Co-Innovation Facility in 2022 to let technology partners test solutions before deployment in its data centers.
In 2024, it launched Solution Validation Centers to help customers validate deployments in distributed environments.
EPIC focuses on liquid cooling and high-density AI infrastructure.
Criteo, a company operating AI workloads across a distributed infrastructure, said it used the testing process to evaluate liquid cooling before expanding its deployment.
Matthieu Blumberg, Criteo’s senior vice president of engineering infrastructure, security, internal IT, and chief information security officer, said the company assessed the technology’s performance and operational requirements before making it part of its AI infrastructure.
Equinix said enterprises interested in visiting an EPIC location can contact their account teams.
