With the evolution of digital infrastructure, data centres face increasing energy demands, complex cooling challenges, and sustainability pressures. This keynote examines the key drivers reshaping data centres, emphasizing energy efficient computing and advanced cooling technologies, whilst considering sustainability. In addition the presentation touches upon operational challenges, focusing on enhancing efficiency, reducing environmental impact, and adapting infrastructure to support future digital ecosystems.

Professor Jon Summers is Scientific Lead in Data Centres at Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE), an Adjunct Professor in Fluid Mechanics at Lulea Technical University in Sweden and a Visiting Professor in Thermofluids at the University of Leeds. During the last 25 years, he has worked on several government and industry funded projects requiring the use of computation. Having built and managed compute clusters to support many research projects, Jon chaired the High-Performance Computing User Group for 20 years at the University of Leeds. In the last eight years Jon’s research has focused on a range of thermal and energy management projects within Data Centres, Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning and industrial sectors. Since early 2013 Jon has been involved in liquid cooled IT research projects, focussing both at the data centre and the microprocessor scales, which has been further transformed by the opportunities of integrated digital infrastructure research at the RISE ICE test and demo datacenter facility, which includes large testbeds supporting industry and academia. His research and technological development at RISE during this decade is focussed on making the digital infrastructure as energy efficient and sustainable as possible.