Cooling Failure Cascades in AI Data Centers

How a single cooling failure cascades through GPU racks—thermal runaway scenarios, containment strategies, and MEP resilience lessons.

MEP Providers Are Never in the Postmortem

In 2021, I bought a home in Florida. The closing was in August, so imagine the hot summer days with temperatures over 100 degrees and humidity over 80%. When we selected the builder, I noted 2 things: HVAC with 15 SEER and insulation R-39. My house would be minimally energy efficient. I had no option to upgrade the HVAC, but 15 SEER is “good enough”. First week in the house, my wife realized I was getting bothered every time the compressor kicked in - there was a subtle, almost imperceptible, hit on the lights - nobody realized it, but I did. Battle-proven engineer with experience in thermal and power transiency. What could happen? ...

HVAC Doesn't Create Cold — It Removes Heat

This is the first of a series of URE articles about thermal management in data center environments—not theory, not “best practices,” but what actually happens when heat meets physics and scale. Here’s a simple puzzle from two idle machines. ai01 — home lab, Threadripper 32-core with 2× NVIDIA GPUs (NVLink), rack-level liquid cooling loop, used for ML training and vLLM inference: Tctl: +33.0°C Tccd1: +33.2°C Tccd5: +31.5°C nj01 — third-party datacenter (colo), Ryzen 12-core, air-cooled: ...