09/10/2026
Vertiv and NEXTDC won the Innovation Achievement award at the Data Centre Australia Awards — recognised for advancing how data centres are designed, built, and operated in Australia.
The winning project: the NEXTDC Liquid Cooling Centre of Excellence. The facility is helping organisations move from AI planning to AI deployment by providing a live, production-ready environment where customers can experience the full AI infrastructure ecosystem under real-world conditions. Located within the NEXTDC S3 Sydney facility, the Centre of Excellence enables customers to observe, test, and optimize high-density AI infrastructure, from GPU racks and containment to liquid cooling, coolant distribution, and power systems. Rather than evaluating individual technologies in isolation, customers can validate an integrated infrastructure chain operating under real workloads, making AI deployment planning more tangible and less theoretical.
As the infrastructure backbone of the project, Vertiv helped transform the Centre from concept to reality, bringing together modular deployment, power, liquid cooling, and services expertise into a single operational environment. Leveraging Vertiv™ SmartRun and direct-to-chip liquid cooling technologies, the facility showcases AI-ready infrastructure supporting workloads exceeding 100kW per rack in real-world conditions.
Congratulations to NEXTDC and all project partners, Dell Technologies, SRA Solutions, Castrol ON EV Fluids and MODL, in bringing this industry-leading initiative to life.
Learn more about Vertiv's liquid cooling solutions: http://ms.spr.ly/6185aZTWc