Industry leaders gather in Sydney to reimagine the role of cooling in the AI era

Schneider Electric has successfully hosted its Innovation Day: Reinventing Cooling for the AI Era at Hilton Sydney, bringing together more than 170 industry leaders, consultants, and enterprise stakeholders to explore how advanced cooling technologies are enabling the next generation of AI-ready data centres.

The event brought together industry leaders including guest speakers from Dell, Motivair, Nvidia, and HPE, who shared expert insights on the future of cooling in the AI era. As data centres evolve to meet the demands of increasingly complex and high-density workloads, strategic alliances are becoming essential. These companies reaffirmed their commitment to collaboration—developing guidelines and educational initiatives that address key trends in technology, accelerate innovation, enhance sustainability, meet global demands, and strengthen security.

Speakers highlighted the growing need for advanced cooling solutions as the industry pushes past rack densities of 140kW, with future provisions reaching 1MW and beyond. As AI chips become hotter and more compact, liquid cooling is emerging as a critical technology to maintain peak uptime and efficiency. With cooling consuming up to 40% of a data centre’s power budget, direct liquid cooling offers a transformative advantage—being up to 3,000 times more effective than air cooling by capturing heat directly at the chip level. However, deploying this technology is complex and requires a true end-to-end approach, encompassing everything from sourcing and installation to ongoing maintenance.

The event marked the first Innovation Day since Schneider Electric’s acquisition of a majority stake in Motivair Corporation, a global leader in liquid cooling and thermal management for high-performance computing. This partnership reinforces Schneider Electric’s ability to deliver comprehensive and integrated solutions to the growing AI ecosystem.

Farokh Ghadially, Vice President, IT & Data Centres, Schneider Electric said, “Our role is to help customers not only adapt to this change, but to seize the opportunities it creates, building AI-ready infrastructure that is efficient, resilient, and aligned with global sustainability goals. Today we are the only liquid cooling provider to demonstrate proven expertise at the silicon level by co-developing our solutions in collaboration with NVIDIA, and other leading GPU manufacturers. In collaboration with Schneider Electric, we have created an unmatched portfolio that not only compresses time-to-market but increases ROI for customers worldwide.”

“The strong turnout and engagement at Innovation Day demonstrates how critical cooling has become to the future of AI infrastructure. What we’re seeing is a once-in-a-generation shift in how data centres are designed and operated.”

As part of this strengthened portfolio, Innovation Day also highlighted Schneider Electric’s industry-first frameworks for managing power and liquid cooling in AI data centres, co-engineered with NVIDIA. Featuring integrated power management and Schneider Electric’s Motivair liquid cooling control technologies, the solutions help operators precisely manage critical resources and accelerate the deployment of advanced AI infrastructure.