Terry KS MALAYSIA, 27 OCTOBER 2026 – Digital infrastructure company Equinix has introduced the Equinix Enhanced Performance Innovation Centers, or EPIC, establishing an international network of production-ready liquid cooling facilities designed to help enterprises trial, build, and deploy high-density artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The initiative launches across five global metropolises comprising Frankfurt, London, Osaka, Paris, and Sydney, with additional expansion sites planned for 2027. The launch comes at a pivotal time for enterprise technology across the Asia-Pacific region, including Malaysia, where data center growth is surging alongside rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
As enterprise AI strategies pivot from early experimentation to high-scale production, cooling architecture, power distribution, and connectivity have emerged as critical bottlenecks determining operational efficiency and speed to market. Modern graphical processing unit architectures demand significantly higher rack densities that conventional air-cooling systems can no longer support efficiently. Because few enterprise IT teams possess specialized in-house expertise across integrated facility power, fluid dynamics, and high-density networking, unaddressed engineering gaps frequently stall deployment timelines.
EPIC addresses these hurdles by providing dedicated testing environments within active, carrier-neutral facilities. Enterprise teams can assess advanced liquid-cooled GPU and CPU platforms from leading hardware vendors, running both inference and complex model training workloads under real operational parameters. Working directly alongside infrastructure specialists, organizations can pinpoint hardware bottlenecks, assess thermal behavior, and resolve operational challenges before committing capital to full-scale rollouts.
Brian Stein, senior vice president of infrastructure products and services at Equinix, highlighted that liquid cooling has shifted from a niche alternative into an essential baseline requirement for any organization scaling artificial intelligence. He noted that EPIC gives enterprises the environment to validate systems with certainty before proceeding with massive capital expenditure, leveraging the company global ecosystem to speed the journey from initial design to active production.
Through EPIC, engineering teams gain access to:
The EPIC rollout extends an established series of innovation programs at Equinix. In 2022, the group introduced its Co-Innovation Facility to validate emerging technologies prior to broader data center adoption, followed by the 2024 launch of Solution Validation Centers for distributed hybrid architectures. EPIC applies this hands-on verification model directly to thermal management and heavy AI compute demands.
Matthieu Blumberg, senior vice president of engineering infrastructure, security, internal IT, and chief information security officer at global commerce media firm Criteo, shared that adopting liquid cooling represented an unfamiliar transition that required step-by-step validation. He explained that testing across distributed footprints showed how the cooling technology performed under load, equipping the team with the necessary operational insight to scale their systems confidently into full production.
Malaysian and regional enterprises seeking to evaluate liquid-cooled compute architectures can coordinate through regional account representatives or access the EPIC program portal online.