Cloud, streaming, generative AI… while all of these are increasingly becoming hot topics of discussion, data centres—the large, boxy buildings that house high-powered computers—are looking for innovative solutions to stay cool.

Aiding them in this process are a handful of players in the heating, ventilation, and cooling (HVAC) space—the likes of US-based Vertiv, France-based Schneider Electric, and Stulz, headquartered in Germany. Just in October, Vertiv collaboratedVertivVertiv codevelops with NVIDIA complete power and cooling blueprint for NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 platform with US-based graphics-processing unit (GPU) provider Nvidia to help advance the use of data centres.

Put simply, the advent of GPU computingGPU computingGraphics processing units, or GPUs, perform parallel data processing. And GPU-powered data centres can perform at a larger scale with fewer servers has opened an opportunity for these companies to pitch to data-centre providers the idea of liquid cooling—using water to absorb the heat generated by servers.

Think of it this way: your laptop, when put to work all day, heats up from running at full capacity. The heat produced by running a powerful computer at top efficiency is going to be much more intense. Put several of these together—multiplied by a factor of industrial-strength GPUs—running around the clock, and it makes sense as to why cooling is such an important part of data-centre operations.

Currently, India’s data centres, spread across an area of about 8 million square feet, have a total capacity of nearly 1 gigawatt (GW). That’s expected to almost double in the next two years, according to a reportCBREAsia Pacific Data Centre Trends - Q1 2024 by real-estate consultancy CBRE Group. And most of them use traditional air-cooling methods.

“Only about 10 megawatts (MW) of the country’s total capacity currently uses liquid cooling,” said Raghuveer Singh, senior director of colocationColocationColocation is the practice where a company rents space at a data centre to host their servers and other IT equipment and cooling services of the India division of Vertiv. “But in the next two years, we expect this [liquid-cooling] capacity to go up by 28X.”

Thanks to the Indian government’s Rs 10,000 crore (US$1.2 billion) GPU tenderBusiness StandardGlobal tech leaders eye Rs 10,000 cr AI tender as India expands AI mission hanging in the balance, more players are throwing their hats into the data-centre ring.