In the largest year-over-year jump in AFCOM’s decade of research, the research group’s newest 2026 State of the Data Centre Report has found that the average rack density has climbed from 16 kW to 27 kW in just one year,
Furthermore, the study concluded that 72% of operators expect AI workloads to increase data centre capacity requirements whilst more than 60% of organisations are either already using liquid cooling or plan to adopt it within the next two years.
Scaling direct-to-chip liquid cooling demands a complete rethink of the cooling stack, with the industry subsequently challenged to design integrated, scalable architectures that support next‑generation high‑density compute.
Six paths to heat rejection
In order to select the most appropriate liquid cooling architecture, data centre operators must weigh four primary factors: existing cooling infrastructure compatibility, deployment size, speed of deployment, and energy efficiency.
