High-Density & AI Rack Cooling

Racks that draw 30 kW and above break the assumptions air-cooled halls were built on — the air simply cannot carry the heat away fast enough.

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WhatWhere conventional air cooling runs out

A hall designed around 5–8 kW per rack works because the room acts as a buffer. At 30 kW and above that stops being true: the air volume needed to carry the heat away becomes impractical to move through a rack, hot spots form regardless of containment, and cooling has to be brought physically closer to the load — close-coupled to the row, the rack, or ultimately the chip.

WhoWho buys it

Operators deploying AI training and inference clusters, HPC facilities, colocation providers retrofitting high-density suites into existing halls, and the M&E contractors delivering them.

WhyWhy density changes the whole design

Two things break at once. First, air: the mass flow required through a 30 kW rack is beyond what conventional perforated-tile delivery can supply, so containment alone no longer solves it. Second, water temperature: high-density deployments generally return warmer water, which is actually an advantage — it makes free cooling viable for far more hours than a conventional hall achieves, provided the heat rejection plant was sized for it.

HowBringing cooling to the load

Move heat rejection closer to the rack — in-row or rear-door heat exchangers cut the air path from tens of metres to centimetres. Design the water loop around the warmer return temperatures density produces, and size dry coolers to exploit that: the same equipment that struggles at 12 °C return free-cools comfortably at 30 °C. Keep redundancy at the row rather than the hall, because a failure now affects a much larger load concentrated in a smaller space.

Equipment this application needs

Heat Exchangers Close-coupled & rear-door Heat Exchangers362 Bringing the water within centimetres of the load — the practical answer above 30 kW per rack. Dry Cooler Warm-water heat rejection Dry Cooler349 Higher return temperatures make free cooling viable for far more hours than a conventional hall. Centrifugal Fans High-static air handling Centrifugal Fans702 EC plug fans developing the pressure that dense rack airflow requires. Chilling Equipment Trim cooling Chilling Equipment88 Covering the hours ambient cannot, at a much reduced run time. Refrigeration & Heat Exchange Parts Valves, sensors & controls Refrigeration & Heat Exchange Parts120 Flow balancing and leak detection close to live IT equipment.

What to check before you order

EC Motor 181
High-static duty at continuously varying load.
Variable Speed 84
Flow follows rack load rather than running at design flow permanently.
Energy Saving 1,128
At this density, cooling energy is a material share of total facility power.
Stainless Steel 1,914
Water circuits running close to live electronics — material quality is a risk control.
Low Noise 588
High-static fan arrays are the loudest equipment in the hall.

Products for this application

Questions buyers ask

At what rack density does air cooling stop working?
There is no single cliff, but conventional room-based air cooling becomes impractical somewhere around 20–30 kW per rack. Beyond that the air mass flow needed through the rack exceeds what floor-tile delivery can supply, hot spots persist despite containment, and cooling has to be moved physically closer to the load.
Does high density make free cooling harder?
Usually the opposite. Dense deployments return warmer water, and warmer return temperatures mean ambient air can reject the heat for many more hours per year. The requirement is that the heat rejection plant was designed for that warmer loop — retrofitting density into a hall whose dry coolers were sized for a cold loop is where the problem appears.
Where should redundancy sit in a high-density deployment?
At the row rather than the hall. When 30 kW racks are concentrated in a few rows, a single cooling failure affects a large load in a small space with very little thermal buffer — the time available before shutdown is measured in minutes, not the tens of minutes a conventional hall allows.

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