Equinix launches EPIC facility in Sydney

Data centre operator Equinix has launched a network of production-ready liquid cooling environments, including one at its SY5 facility, its largest data centre in Australia to date.

The Equinix Enhanced Performance Innovation Centres (EPIC) are now live in the SY5 and facilities in Frankfurt, London, Osaka and Paris. The solution is designed to help enterprises trial the latest liquid-cooled GPU and CPU platforms and test AI training and inference workloads under real-world conditions.

The company says its experts will help its customers identify infrastructure and operational issues before production and make informed decisions as they scale and seek to ensure their AI infrastructure is ready to keep pace with adoption. Enterprise teams will be able to observe liquid cooling technologies in action, understand how each fits into specific environments, observe how liquid cooling systems integrate, and test their infrastructure inside a live Equinix data centre.

Equinix SVP for Infrastructure Products and Services Brian Stein said liquid cooling has become a central component of modern enterprise infrastructure.

“[It is also] a hard requirement for customers deploying AI,” he said. “EPIC provides businesses with a place to test, validate and build with confidence before they commit to large-scale deployments. We’re putting our global infrastructure footprint and unmatched ecosystem to work to accelerate the path from concept to production for our customers.”

Located in Alexandria, the SY5 data centre has nearly 4950 m² of floor space and utilises liquid cooling technology to manage heat by circulating cooling fluid directly over CPUs and GPUs.

EPIC facilities are joining existing Equinix innovation spaces including its Co-Innovation Facilities, designed to help partners test new technology before it enters Equinix data centres, and its Solution Validation Centres for customers to validate deployments and see how Equinix supports distributed environments.

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