AI may be changing the technology behind data centre cooling, but Matthew Thompson, Managing Director at Airsys Europe, argues that attracting and developing the people capable of designing, installing and maintaining it will be just as important.

Every September, children up and down the country dust off their pencil cases and, somewhere between the new stationery and the first-day nerves, most of us have a quiet flashback to our own school days. It’s a fitting time, then, for National Data Centre Day to land — because if there’s one part of this industry that’s genuinely going back to school right now, it’s cooling.

For years, cooling was the bit of the data centre that quietly did its job in the background. Chillers ran, CRAC (computer room air conditioning) units hummed and, as long as the server inlet temperature was maintained within limits, nobody asked too many questions. That world has gone. AI workloads have pushed rack densities to levels that would have seemed absurd five years ago, and the air-cooling playbook that trained a generation of technicians simply doesn’t stretch far enough any more. Liquid cooling, rear-door heat exchangers, direct-to-chip systems… what used to be a niche specialism is fast becoming core knowledge, and that shift is opening the door wide for the people coming into this industry next.

To be clear, air cooling isn’t going anywhere. It remains the right solution for a huge proportion of IT load and will continue to be so for years to come. But the growth of AI and high-performance computing has changed the balance of the conversation. Where liquid cooling was once reserved for a handful of specialist deployments, it’s now being adopted at pace as operators grapple with heat densities that air cooling alone cannot manage.

This, however, is far from the endpoint. Technologies such as direct-to-chip and two-phase liquid cooling are already on the horizon, promising to handle the even greater densities the next wave of AI hardware will demand. For anyone interested in engineering and innovation, that makes this a genuinely exciting time to be working in a research and development (R&D) department, helping define the next decade of thermal management rather than simply keeping pace with it.

Here’s the thing about a rapidly changing technical landscape: it creates demand for people who understand it. The technicians who can troubleshoot a liquid-cooled rack, who understand fluid dynamics as well as electrical safety, who can bridge IT hardware and mechanical engineering… they are, and will continue to be, in short supply. For anyone weighing up career options, that’s about as close to a guarantee of job security and longevity as you’ll find in any sector right now.

Crucially, this isn’t a field that wants only one type of person. The industry needs degree-qualified engineers who can model thermodynamics and design the next generation of cooling solutions. Equally, it needs people who’ve come up through apprenticeships, who know their way around a CRAC unit and a set of pipes, and who’ve learned their craft hands-on rather than in a lecture theatre. Neither route is more valid than the other. Increasingly, the best teams are the ones that have both, with each learning from the other on site.

One of the best-kept secrets of the data centre sector is just how many different ways there are into it. Design and build is an obvious entry point: mechanical and electrical engineers shape how a facility will breathe and stay cool before a single server is installed. But then there’s the operational side: the teams responsible for keeping that cooling running flawlessly, day and night, so uptime never becomes a headline.

Look a little further and the picture gets even bigger. Behind every cooling system installed in a data centre sits a supply chain that needs its own army of specialists. Manufacturers need sales and marketing people who can translate complex thermal engineering into a message customers understand, while their R&D teams push the boundaries of what a cooling unit can do. They need manufacturing and operations staff to turn designs into physical equipment, and project delivery teams to make sure it arrives on site, on time, and is installed correctly.

Then there are the commissioning engineers, who prove a system works exactly as intended before it goes live, and the service and maintenance engineers, who keep it running for the next 10, 15 or 20 years. That’s before you even get to the technicians on the data centre floor themselves.

Put simply: whether your interest is hands-on engineering, design, sales, project management or R&D, there’s a cooling-shaped route into this industry with your name on it.

With data centres now a significant economic growth area, responsibility doesn’t sit with employers alone. Both the government and the education sector have parts to play too, ensuring there are tailored courses, structured schemes and proper funding in place to draw the next generation into data centre careers. Done well, this is how the industry plugs its skills gaps and builds a genuine pipeline of talent, laying the foundations for sustained economic growth that benefits this generation of professionals and the ones that follow.

So, as National Data Centre Day rolls around this year, with its back-to-school energy, it feels worth saying plainly: there has rarely been a better time to start, or restart, a career in this industry. AI isn’t making cooling roles obsolete; it’s making them more interesting, more technical and more essential than ever. The sector needs thinkers and doers, graduates and apprentices, people who want to design the future and people who want to keep today’s facilities running without a hitch.

Whatever your background, whatever your skill set and whatever stage of your career you’re at, there’s a place for you in data centre cooling.