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Equinix introduced EPIC, a network of production-ready liquid-cooling environments in Frankfurt, London, Osaka, Paris and Sydney, letting enterprises test high-density AI hardware inside live data centers before committing.
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Equinix's EPIC (Enhanced Performance Innovation Center) liquid-cooling demonstration units, from the company's announcement.
Image: Equinix
Source · Press image from Equinix's announcement on PR Newswire, used for news reporting.
Equinix said on October 21 that it has introduced the Equinix Enhanced Performance Innovation Centers, or EPIC, a global network of production-ready liquid cooling environments, according to the company's press release. EPIC is live in Frankfurt, London, Osaka, Paris and Sydney, with more locations expected to open in 2027.
EPIC is the third generation of Equinix test spaces and the first built around liquid cooling.
Illustration (AI-generated)
Each EPIC site operates inside a live Equinix data center. Enterprises can trial liquid-cooled GPU and CPU platforms with hardware partners and run AI training and inference workloads under real-world conditions, with Equinix staff alongside to flag infrastructure and operational problems before production, the company said.
The pitch is about density. Equinix says increasingly powerful GPU platforms are driving higher rack densities and greater demand for liquid cooling, and that few enterprises have the expertise to get cooling, power, networking and facility operations working together. "Liquid cooling is an essential component of modern enterprise infrastructure and a hard requirement for customer's deploying AI," said Brian Stein, senior vice president of infrastructure products and services at Equinix.
EPIC builds on earlier programs: a Co-Innovation Facility announced in 2022 for partner testing, and Solution Validation Centers rolled out in 2024 for customer deployments. For the data-center market the move shifts part of the liquid-cooling learning curve from the customer's own site into the colocation provider's halls, which can shorten the path from proof of concept to a rack-scale deployment.
The release does not name the hardware or cooling partners, give rack power densities, capacity figures or pricing, or say which 2027 sites will follow. Trade press may differ on the exact site count at launch; this report relies on Equinix's own list of five.
