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DATA CENTRE FEATURE SERIES
POWER, COOLING AND SKILLS
By Eamonn Ryan
At the 2026 Pan African Data Centre conference, a panel discussion on‘ The impact of evolving chip cooling requirements on data centre operations and design’ unpacked this reality from multiple angles: technology, design, regulation, operations and skills.
The panel consisted of moderator Mark Acton, director of
Acton Consulting; Garid Glenn, senior technical manager: Baltimore Air Coil; Juan-Pierre van Zyl, data centre facility manager: xneelo; and Mike Meyer, managing director, Portman Partners.
The accelerating deployment of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and hyperscale workloads is transforming the physical and economic logic of data centres worldwide. In Africa, where digital infrastructure is expanding rapidly but unevenly, power has emerged as the decisive factor shaping where new sites can be built and how they must be designed.
The discussion began with an apparently simple question: Why have we made life so difficult for ourselves? Acton’ s comment was directed at the industry’ s embrace of ever more powerful chips, especially GPUs, packed into ever smaller spaces. Van Zyl pointed out that everyday use of AI assistants, large language models and recommendation engines is driving unprecedented demand for compute and, in turn, data centre power and cooling.
Van Zyl confirmed the consequences at facility level: Steep increases in cabinet density that are no longer marginal or experimental. Operators have steadily raised kW per rack, but AI has turned this into a step change, with design envelopes stretching towards 30, 40, even 60kW per rack and beyond. The challenge is not only cooling these loads today but deciding what to design for in facilities that must remain viable for 10 – 20 years. How far can an operator responsibly go in designing for such possibilities without stranding capital if the demand does not materialise?
Meyer expanded the frame by examining how the sector has historically approached design and site selection. The industry, he argued, badly underestimated the speed at which digital behaviour would evolve. Many of today’ s‘ legacy’ data centres are only three or four years old, yet already misaligned with current workloads. For Africa, this recent history is both a warning and an opportunity: new facilities, unconstrained by older builds, can be more future‐proof if they take a different approach from the outset.
A key distinction drawn during the panel was between AI training and inference. Training is batch‐oriented, extremely compute‐intensive and typically happens in“ gigafactories” filled with accelerators that can be sited in remote, low‐cost locations with sufficient, stable power and connectivity. Inference, by contrast, is the day‐to‐day answering of queries and recommendations that must occur closer to users, often in smaller, more distributed deployments.
For African planners, this distinction has profound implications. Remote locations with access to large power allocations – particularly from renewables – may be attractive candidates for AI training facilities. Urban and peri‐urban sites, often constrained by grid limitations and higher ambient temperatures, will remain essential for inference, cloud and enterprise workloads that cannot tolerate high latency( the delay between sending a request over the network and getting a response back). Site selection, therefore, is no longer just a question of‘ where is power available?’ but‘ which kind of power, in what profile, for which class of workload?’
Data artificial centres intelligence
All images by © RACA Journal
( Left to right) Mike Meyer, managing director, Portman Partners; Juan-Pierre van Zyl, data centre facility manager: xneelo; Garid Glenn, senior technical manager: Baltimore Air Coil; and moderator Mark Acton, director of Acton Consulting.
RACA Journal I October 2026
COOLING TECHNOLOGIES, LOCATION AND THE HYBRID FUTURE
Cooling strategy has become inseparable from these power considerations. As densities rise, simply supplying more chilled air is no longer feasible or efficient. Glenn outlined how direct liquid cooling enables higher approach temperatures and more hours of free cooling, which, in many African climates, could significantly reduce both energy consumption and water usage. This is particularly important in regions where evaporative cooling is constrained by water scarcity or regulatory limits.
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