DESIGN & BUILD
Ecolab’ s global water business is headquartered in Naperville, Illinois and serves 1,800 employees
– it marks a fundamental reimagining of data centre infrastructure.
“ AI is changing everything. It’ s reshaping the way business is done,” Rob observes.“ But it’ s also reshaping the way that data centres are being built. They’ re moving from CPUs to GPUs, and those are getting faster, hotter and they’ re using more electricity.”
The evolution from CPUs to increasingly powerful GPUs has created heat densities that air cooling simply cannot address – but there is an alternative.
Direct-to-chip liquid cooling itself is hardly a new technology. Supercomputers have employed these systems for years. What distinguishes the current moment, according to Rob, is“ really the scale of it and the speed of implementation”.
Data centre operators are racing against the clock, driven by what the industry calls speed-to-first compute – the crucial timeline between breaking ground and training AI models.
“ Getting those data centres set up so they can train the models and then do the work of the AI
132 December 2025