STEVEN CARLINI
AI
“ With the advent of Blackwell chips from NVIDIA, new data centres have to be liquid cooled now,” Steven says.“ With every generation of new GPU processing, you have no choice but to go with liquid cooling.”
Unlike a UPS, which arrives as a defined product, liquid cooling has to be assembled on site.
“ You have to put the heat rejection, the method of cooling, the distribution units and all the piping together,” Steven explains, noting that each deployment is built around its own environment, whether dry coolers or water-assisted alternatives. Power delivery is under similar strain.“ All the power cables are copper and to get that much power into a single rack bangs up against the laws of physics,” he says.“ This means you’ re running out of room to get that much copper power to the servers themselves.”
STEVEN CARLINI
TITLE: CHIEF ADVOCATE, AI AND DATA CENTRES
COMPANY: SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC INDUSTRY: AI AND DATA CENTRES
LOCATION: BOYNTON BEACH, FLORIDA, US
Steven has worked at Schneider Electric for almost 20 years, having begun in data centre marketing before leading the IT Division’ s Office of Innovation and Data Centre Solutions.
Keeping pace with NVIDIA NVIDIA’ s willingness to work with whichever partner can keep up – and its readiness to move on otherwise – sets the tone for how far Schneider Electric’ s engineers have to stretch.
“ You meet with them and it’ s very exciting because you believe AI is going to save the world and it’ s going to change everything,” Steven says.“ NVIDIA are hyper motivated to build things to make that happen so they’ re always pushing the envelope.”
Vertical integration adds to the challenge of keeping up with NVIDIA’ s innovation.
Steven notes:“ They’ re not just doing the GPUs. They’ re doing the power supplies and they’ re packaging them up with their CPUs now, as well as server boards and the physical servers.”
Designs can shift mid-project as a result.“ We did our design for the original Blackwell at 120KW per rack,” Steven says.“ NVIDIA then made some changes at the end and we had to use a little bit more power to lower the temperature of the cooling a little bit to accommodate it being 132KW per rack in the end.”
76 August 2026