Equinix opens a Sydney test room for liquid-cooled AI chips

At a glance

• Equinix announced a liquid cooling test room inside SY5 at Alexandria in Sydney on 21 October 2026, one of five it says are now live, alongside London, Paris, Frankfurt and Osaka.

• The Sydney room holds 10 cabinets across two cages, each able to take up to about 130kW of liquid-cooled equipment, with about 550kW of cooling capacity in total.

• Equinix's Australian managing director, Jarrod Nink, told Certified Strategic that Sydney was chosen on demand from businesses moving AI out of experiments and into real deployment.

• Liquid cooling appears on one of the 18 Australian site pages Equinix publishes, and six of the 18 list high-density cooling among the products a customer can order.

The newest AI chips are packed so densely that data centres are moving from air cooling to liquid cooling, which runs coolant directly over each processor. On 21 October 2026, Equinix announced a room inside SY5, its Alexandria facility in Sydney, where companies can test liquid cooling. It calls the program EPIC, short for Equinix Enhanced Performance Innovation Centers, and names the Sydney site as SY5. A customer tests liquid-cooled GPU and CPU platforms from Equinix's hardware partners inside a working data hall and runs training and inference work on them ahead of a larger deployment. Four more rooms are live, in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Osaka.

Equinix told Certified Strategic that the SY5 room runs 10 cabinets, each able to take up to about 130kW of liquid-cooled equipment, with about 550kW of cooling capacity across the room. Equinix says a rack of current-generation GPUs can draw more than 200kW, and that most data centres built before this generation of chips were designed around 5 to 10kW a rack. Jarrod Nink, Equinix's managing director for Australia, told Certified Strategic that Sydney was "a natural choice as one of the first five locations", reflecting "the strong demand we're seeing from businesses looking to move AI from experimentation into real-world deployment".

The EPIC cage at Equinix SY5 in Alexandria. Image: Equinix.

About four cabinets could run at the 130kW ceiling at once

The 10 cabinets in the SY5 room are split between two cages. Ten cabinets at 130kW would come to 1,300kW, more than twice the room's cooling capacity, so a single cabinet can take 130kW and about four could run at that level at once.

Each cabinet is cooled direct to chip, with coolant running through a plate bolted against each processor to carry the heat away. Equinix describes the plumbing in its release and on its own pages: one loop carries heat from a coolant distribution unit out to the building's chillers, a second carries coolant from that unit to the racks, and flexible hoses and quick-release couplings feed each server, with leak detection and automatic shutoff valves underneath. In the SY5 room the coolant distribution units are installed N+N, a full duplicate set, so one set can carry the room if the other fails.

Inside the EPIC room at SY5. Image: Equinix.

Equinix's launch names Criteo as its reference customer

Equinix named one customer in the launch material. Matthieu Blumberg, who leads engineering infrastructure, security and internal IT at advertising technology company Criteo, said the company watched liquid cooling perform, then "learned what it took to run it well, and then committed to scale". The EPIC program page offers the same sequence, with documented findings and a recommended next step from each session.

An EPIC session is booked through an Equinix account team, and the room lets a customer see the coolant loops, leak detection and maintenance before signing for space.

Six of Equinix's 18 Australian sites list high-density cooling

SY5 is also the only one of Equinix's 18 Australian sites whose published page lists liquid cooling. Six of the 18 list high-density cooling.

Source: Equinix Australian data centre pages, checked 26 October 2026. The other 12 sites list neither.

Equinix calls SY5 its largest Australian facility to date, with 9,220 cabinets at full build, and it houses SCX.ai, an Australian AI company that listed on the ASX on 21 August 2026 and runs its SambaNova inference chips there. When Equinix announced A$240 million of expansion at SY5 and ME2 on 20 June 2024, it said it would expand support for direct-to-chip liquid cooling in Australia from early in the second half of that year.

Gartner forecasts Australian spending on rented computing to rise 22.1% in 2027

Equinix pitches EPIC at enterprise infrastructure teams. Australian organisations' spending on rented computing, known as infrastructure as a service, is the fastest-growing line in Gartner's Australian IT forecast. Gartner's forecast, published on 16 September 2026, has it reaching A$9.12 billion in 2027, up 22.1 per cent, with the AI-optimised part growing 58.5 per cent.

Those buyers sit apart from the hyperscalers and AI labs contracting hundreds of megawatts at a time. An enterprise deploying its first liquid-cooled rack takes a cabinet or a cage. NEXTDC runs a comparable room for that buyer, a liquid cooling demonstration suite inside its S3 facility at Artarmon built with partners including Vertiv, Dell Technologies and NVIDIA.

What to watch

The SY5 room's setup. Equinix says it can upgrade parts of the room's configuration to meet customer demand.

The next locations. Equinix says more EPIC locations are expected to open in 2027. Its Australian site pages list high-density cooling in Melbourne and Perth as well as Sydney.