Liquid cooling specialist Iceotope has hired an ex-Microsoft datacenter exec on an advistory capacity as the company eyes global expansion amid insatiable demand for high-powered bit barns to feed the AI craze.

Iceotope said it has onboarded Christian Belady, who served as vice president of datacenter research and a distinguished at Microsoft until October. He has more than four decades of experience in datacenter and infrastructure management.

Belady will be working as senior advisor to the company, which recently opened its US base at a new site in Raleigh, North Carolina, to help act as a springboard for business development.

The outfit, which is headquartered in the English city of Sheffield, is banking on the growing need for cooling systems, in part because of the recent spike in demand for high-powered servers to handle the processing requirements of AI.

"The demand for AI has reset the clock in the datacenter industry and the emergence of new power and cooling solutions is becoming paramount to enable continued growth. Clearly, liquid cooling will play a role in this future. However, the industry needs to work together and develop standards to do so," Belady said in a statement.

His experience and first-hand knowledge of large-scale datacenter ops will no doubt prove invaluable to Iceotope in its endeavors. He previously developed the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric for measuring the energy efficiency of datacenters, and also had prior roles at Hewlett Packard, Convex Computers, Texas Instruments, and IBM.

Iceotope is not, however, the only company that Belady is advising. In February, he was named as a senior advisor to DigitalBridge Group, the global investment biz that owns and operates bit barns and other key infrastructure assets.

Belady's role there is to "provide strategic counsel to DigitalBridge in support" of the continuing development of the datacenter portfolio, which again is facing "unprecedented demand driven by investment in cloud and AI," DigitalBridge said.

As for Iceotope, the company recently introduced its second-generation KUL RAN gear, a 2U chassis enclosing an HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen11 server ready fitted with Precision Liquid Cooling technology for telecos customers.

Last year, the company was also picked by UK telecoms giant BT to trial liquid cooling across its entire network and IT infrastructure.

Iceotope is scheduled to roll out new technologies this year and lopen up on additional deployments and agreements as part of its expansion program. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/04/05/iceotope_microsoft_exec_advisor/