Equinix opens liquid cooling test sites in London and four other cities
Enterprises can trial liquid-cooled AI hardware alongside partners before buying it, as the power drawn by a GPU rack outgrows what older data centers were built to handle
- The London center is in Equinix’s LD5 data center; Paris uses PA10, Frankfurt FR6 and Osaka OS3
- Customers work with Equinix staff, technology partners and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to assess combined liquid cooling stacks, according to the release
- Equinix says each center runs under real production conditions
- The release names no participating hardware vendor and no specific cooling method
Organizations weighing high-density AI hardware can now watch liquid-cooled racks run in a working colocation facility before they sign for capacity. Equinix has published no price, trial length or eligibility terms, and visits are arranged through its account teams or a program page, so it is not yet clear whether organizations without an Equinix contract can book one.
“EPIC provides businesses with a place to test, validate and build with confidence before they commit to large-scale deployments.”Brian Stein, senior vice-president, infrastructure products and services, Equinix
Equinix opened five liquid cooling test centers inside its live data centers on 21 October, in Frankfurt, London, Osaka, Paris and Sydney, and expects more locations to open in 2027. At the Equinix Enhanced Performance Innovation Centers (EPIC), enterprises can trial liquid-cooled GPU and CPU platforms with hardware partners and test AI training and inference workloads before a production rollout.
Equinix ties the launch to rack density. In a post on its blog the same day, the company says a rack of current-generation GPUs can draw more than 200 kW, while most data centers built a few years ago were designed around 5 to 10 kW per rack. It also says few enterprises have the expertise to get cooling, power, networking and facility operations working together, and that a gap in any one of them can stall a deployment.
EPIC follows two earlier Equinix programs. The company announced a Co-Innovation Facility in 2022, where partners tested new technology before it entered Equinix data centers, and in 2024 rolled out Solution Validation Centers for customers validating their deployments.
Criteo is the one customer named in the announcement. Matthieu Blumberg, its senior vice-president of engineering infrastructure, security and internal IT and its CISO, said liquid cooling was “new territory” for the company, which “committed to scale” only after seeing how it performed in practice.
Sources
- Equinix, “Equinix Opens Innovation Centers Globally to Accelerate Enterprise Infrastructure Deployments”, press release, 21 October 2026. https://newsroom.equinix.com/2026-10-21-Equinix-Opens-Innovation-Centers-Globally-to-Accelerate-Enterprise-Infrastructure-Deployments
- Equinix, “Inside EPIC: Where Enterprises Test Liquid Cooling Before They Scale AI”, blog post, 21 October 2026. https://careers.equinix.com/blogs/interconnections-the-equinix-blog/inside-epic-where-enterprises-test-liquid-cooling-before-they-scale-ai
- IT Brief UK, “Equinix launches global liquid cooling test centres”, 21 October 2026. https://itbrief.co.uk/story/equinix-launches-global-liquid-cooling-test-centres
- The Fast Mode, “Equinix Opens Global Innovation Centers for Liquid Cooling and AI Infrastructure”, 21 October 2026. https://www.thefastmode.com/technology-solutions/51137-equinix-opens-global-innovation-centers-for-liquid-cooling-and-ai-infrastructure
