To unlock the full potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Nigeria, Country President, Schneider Electric Anglophone Africa, Ajibola Akindele, has urged data centre operators to move beyond the status quo and embrace advanced, sustainable liquid cooling.
 
Speaking with journalists, he emphasised that the rapid adoption of AI and high-performance computing in Africa required a radical rethink of data centre design, adding that they were moving away from traditional cooling methods toward liquid cooling, which provided the density and efficiency needed to power Nigeria’s digital future without compromising their sustainability goals.
 
He described cooling systems as the second-largest energy consumers in data centres after core Information Technology equipment, making them a key focus for efficiency improvements. He explained that energy performance is shaped by design and operational decisions, including site selection, climate conditions, and heat rejection systems.
   
He argued that AI workloads are breaking the cooling mould and pushing rack power densities to new norms, as current rack densities can range from 40 kW to well over 100 kW, which is impractical to manage with air cooling.
 
He said: “Demands continue to climb rapidly with each new generation of Graphics Processing Unit-accelerated servers.”

Today, fully populated NVIDIA-based GPU racks draw approximately 132 kW, and that number is set to rise. The next generation is projected to reach 240 kW per rack, and the industry is already preparing for future power densities of 1 MW per rack.”
   
Ajibola, however, emphasised the urgent adoption of direct cooling in Nigeria, where ambient temperatures remain high, noting that it is up to 3,000 times more effective and more efficient at removing heat than air because it captures heat directly at the chip level.