“There really has been a major shift within the last couple of years,” Bajpayee said. “I would even say within the last 12 months is where we have seen suddenly a rapid increase in the data center operators’ desire to control their water destiny.” For Gradiant, the MIT-born water technology company that built its reputation serving semiconductor manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and industrial customers worldwide, that shift has translated into a rapidly expanding pipeline of data center opportunities. More importantly, Bajpayee believes it signals a fundamental change in how the industry thinks about water itself. The conversation is no longer centered primarily on sustainability metrics or corporate environmental goals. Instead, operators increasingly view water as a business continuity issue. “We’re seeing operators themselves come to us and tell us that these are issues they are facing,” Bajpayee said. “They want to make sure they don’t get stalled, their permits don’t get pulled, their business doesn’t get stopped, and communities don’t push them out because they didn’t figure out a way to control their water.” From Water Treatment to Water Strategy That shift is occurring as Gradiant expands deployments of its recently announced HyperSolved platform, an end-to-end cooling water management system purpose-built for AI data centers. The company says HyperSolved is now being deployed with several of the world’s largest hyperscale operators across North America, Europe, and Asia, reflecting growing industry demand for integrated approaches to water infrastructure. While compute, networking, and power systems have evolved rapidly during the AI era, water management often remains fragmented, requiring operators to coordinate multiple vendors responsible for sourcing, treatment, cooling, wastewater management, reuse, discharge, and regulatory compliance. Gradiant’s approach seeks to consolidate those functions into a single integrated platform and operating model. The timing reflects the growing scale of the challenge. New AI data center

Each month Data Center Frontier, in partnership with Pkaza, posts some of the hottest data center career opportunities in the market. Here’s a look at some of the latest data center jobs posted on the Data Center Frontier jobs board, powered by Pkaza Critical Facilities Recruiting. Looking for Data Center Candidates? Check out Pkaza’s Active Candidate / Featured Candidate Hotlist  Mechanical Applications Engineer Pittsburgh, PA This position is also available in: Denver, CO; Richmond, VA and Georgetown, SC (live by the beach!). Relo available. Our client is a leading provider and manufacturer of industrial HVAC mechanical equipment used in industrial cooling applications for mission critical operations. They help their customers save money by reducing energy and operating costs and provide solutions for modernizing their customer’s existing mechanical infrastructure. This company provides cooling solutions to many of the world’s largest organizations and government facilities and enterprise clients, colocation providers and hyperscale companies. This career-growth minded opportunity offers exciting projects with leading-edge technology and innovation as well as competitive salaries and benefits. Electrical Commissioning Engineer New Albany, OH This traveling position is also available in: New York, NY; White Plains, NY; Dallas, TX; Richmond, VA; Ashburn, VA; Montvale, NJ; Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Hampton, GA; Cedar Rapids, IA; Phoenix, AZ; Salt Lake City, UT; Kansas City, MO; Omaha, NE; Chesterton, IN; Indianapolis, IN or Chicago, IL. *** ALSO looking for a LEAD EE and ME CxA Agents and CxA PMs ***  Our client is an engineering design and commissioning company that has a national footprint and specializes in MEP critical facilities design. They provide design, commissioning, consulting and management expertise in the critical facilities space. They have a mindset to provide reliability, energy efficiency, sustainable design and LEED expertise when providing these consulting services for Enterprise, Colocation and Hyperscale Companies. This career-growth minded opportunity offers exciting projects

ORLANDO, Fla. — Much of the conversation surrounding AI infrastructure has focused on GPUs, power generation, cooling systems, and the unprecedented scale of next-generation data center development. But at Fiber Connect 2026, another reality became increasingly clear: none of those investments matter without the network infrastructure required to connect them. That theme emerged repeatedly during a conversation between Data Center Frontier Editor-in-Chief Matt Vincent and Clearfield Chief Commercial Officer Anis Khemakhem, whose perspective sits at the intersection of broadband infrastructure, fiber deployment, and emerging AI connectivity requirements. While Clearfield is best known throughout the broadband industry for its fiber management and connectivity solutions, Khemakhem argued that AI’s rapid expansion is creating new opportunities, and new challenges, that extend well beyond traditional fiber-to-the-home deployments. “AI is driving that connectivity closer and closer to the edge,” Khemakhem said, noting that growing compute requirements and increasingly latency-sensitive workloads are fundamentally changing assumptions about where infrastructure must reside and how it must be connected. For Data Center Frontier readers, the significance lies in a growing realization that AI infrastructure is becoming as much a networking challenge as a compute challenge. Beyond the Traditional Data Center One of the more notable themes of the discussion was Khemakhem’s view that the term “data center” has become too broad to be useful. The industry often speaks of data centers as a single category, but Clearfield increasingly differentiates between hyperscale campuses, colocation facilities, central office environments, and a rapidly emerging class of edge deployments. “There is no one-size-fits-all data center,” Khemakhem said, describing a continuum that extends from hyperscale facilities all the way to edge locations positioned near users and applications. That distinction matters because many AI applications are introducing latency requirements that cannot always be addressed by centralized facilities alone. As AI inference moves closer to users,

Thermal Validation Becomes a Strategic Capability Cooling is no longer simply a matter of installing enough CRAC units, chillers, CDUs, or rear-door heat exchangers. As rack densities climb and chip-level heat flux intensifies, the performance of the entire thermal chain increasingly depends on how coldplates, manifolds, pumps, controls, facility water loops, power systems, commissioning practices, and service workflows interact. Vertiv said Strategic Thermal Labs will help it simulate and emulate real-world high-density compute conditions, optimize interactions between the thermal chain and power train, and support customers across design, integration, commissioning, and lifecycle operations. That reflects a broader evolution underway in AI infrastructure. Data centers are becoming tightly coupled systems where thermal behavior influences power design, reliability, serviceability, operational efficiency, and ultimately the utilization of increasingly expensive accelerator platforms. Vertiv also emphasized that the acquisition does not alter its commitment to interoperable, server- and silicon-agnostic infrastructure solutions. That distinction matters because hyperscale and colocation operators remain wary of vendor lock-in at a time when chip architectures, server designs, and cooling strategies continue to evolve rapidly. Viewed through that lens, Vertiv’s acquisition reflects a larger industry shift. Infrastructure providers are no longer waiting for server OEMs or chipmakers to define the cooling roadmap. Instead, they are investing deeper in modeling, validation, and chip-level thermal expertise because the next generation of AI infrastructure performance will increasingly be determined by how effectively those systems work together. Accelsius Moves from Technology Validation to Market Scaling Accelsius offers a different view of where the liquid-cooling market is headed. While some vendors are extending existing architectures, Accelsius is focused on making two-phase direct-to-chip cooling easier to deploy, validate, and scale. The company’s recently introduced NeuCool IR150 is designed around that objective. Described by Accelsius as the industry’s first fully integrated rack-level cooling solution for two-phase liquid cooling,

Matt Vincent is Editor in Chief of Data Center Frontier, where he leads editorial strategy and coverage focused on the infrastructure powering cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the digital economy. A veteran B2B technology journalist with more than two decades of experience, Vincent specializes in the intersection of data centers, power, cooling, and emerging AI-era infrastructure. Since assuming the EIC role in 2023, he has helped guide Data Center Frontier’s coverage of the industry’s transition into the gigawatt-scale AI era, with a focus on hyperscale development, behind-the-meter power strategies, liquid cooling architectures, and the evolving energy demands of high-density compute, while working closely with the Digital Infrastructure Group at Endeavor Business Media to expand the brand’s analytical and multimedia footprint. Vincent also hosts The Data Center Frontier Show podcast, where he interviews industry leaders across hyperscale, colocation, utilities, and the data center supply chain to examine the technologies and business models reshaping digital infrastructure. Since its inception he serves as Head of Content for the Data Center Frontier Trends Summit. Before becoming Editor in Chief, he served in multiple senior editorial roles across Endeavor Business Media’s digital infrastructure portfolio, with coverage spanning data centers and hyperscale infrastructure, structured cabling and networking, telecom and datacom, IP physical security, and wireless and Pro AV markets. He began his career in 2005 within PennWell’s Advanced Technology Division and later held senior editorial positions supporting brands such as Cabling Installation & Maintenance, Lightwave Online, Broadband Technology Report, and Smart Buildings Technology. Vincent is a frequent moderator, interviewer, and keynote speaker at industry events including the HPC Forum, where he delivers forward-looking analysis on how AI and high-performance computing are reshaping digital infrastructure. He graduated with honors from Indiana University Bloomington with a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing and lives in southern New Hampshire with

When Schedule Becomes a Risk Surface The day’s third major session brought those concerns directly into the field. Moderated by Don Mitchell of Victaulic and the Open Compute Project, Schedule Is Risk: Rethinking Fabrication and Commissioning for AI Factories explored how schedule pressure is reshaping the realities of liquid cooling deployment. Joining Mitchell were Terry Rodgers, Vice President of Design Engineering at T5 Data Centers; Justin Seter, Strategic Initiatives Officer at DLB Associates; and Vali Sorell, Senior Data Center Design Engineer at Oracle. Collectively, the panel delivered perhaps the most vivid illustration of how AI’s growth is creating new operational bottlenecks. “We have to get really comfortable doing things out of order,” Seter said. The statement captured the reality many teams now face. Equipment is increasingly being ordered before designs are finalized. Prefabricated assemblies are being manufactured before final IT requirements are fully understood. Infrastructure decisions must often be made months before software workloads and hardware configurations are known. The reason is simple. The economics of AI have fundamentally changed the cost of delay. Panelists discussed scenarios in which large AI facilities can generate enormous business value immediately upon deployment, creating intense pressure to accelerate schedules whenever possible. As one participant observed, spending millions to recover schedule may be entirely rational if the alternative is losing substantially more revenue through delayed deployment. The result is an environment in which schedule increasingly dominates project decision-making. “The only thing anybody cares about is schedule,” Seter observed. “Budget means less.” Yet the panel repeatedly warned that schedule compression can create its own risks. Those risks become particularly acute in liquid-cooled environments. Traditional flushing and commissioning practices that once received relatively little attention are now becoming mission-critical activities. Stainless steel piping must be properly passivated. Fluid loops must be thoroughly cleaned. Contamination must be