Hello Reader,
AI euphoria. I finally came up with a phrase to describe what I see happening, only to realise after doing a search that others had, too.
Regardless, let's talk about AI euphoria, that fevered, disproportionate frenzy currently afflicting much of the data centre industry.
Liquid cooling as cure-all
Take liquid cooling. The way it's being described, every problem, past, present, and future, in the data centre is simply waiting to be solved with liquid cooling. Never mind that the majority of data centres run traditional compute that mostly doesn't actually need liquid cooling.
I mean, the Aspire 2A Cray at Singapore's National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) is liquid cooled, but that's also because it was designed to run in a room with no room-level air conditioning.
The inconvenient facts
Talk about the risks of liquid cooling, and you will quickly get people jumping into the comments to issue dire warnings to data centre operators who "ignore" liquid cooling by not going full-on into it.
There's just the inconvenient fact that they usually specialise in liquid cooling hardware or "AI data centres." Also, my own conversations with data centre CEOs in Southeast Asia have actually told me that demand for liquid cooling here is nascent.
My take? Liquid cooling is definitely rewriting the rules of data centre design. But there's a lot of additional work required to ensure it runs well and doesn't result in unscheduled downtime.
Hair-trigger reactions
Then there's the strange way the stock market jumps at the slightest hint of lower-than-expected profits from AI spending. Take what Nvidia's Jensen Huang said about Vera Rubin at his keynote at CES 2026.
“At 45 degrees Celsius, the data center doesn't need a chiller. We essentially used hot water to cool this supercomputer, with incredibly high efficiency.”
And just like that, shares of Johnson Controls, Carrier, and other HVAC companies fell at market open the next day, though most largely recovered later in the week.
But did you know both Vera Rubin and the GPU it is meant to supersede, Grace Blackwell, will work with inlet temperatures of 45°C? The way I saw it, Jensen was expressing how performant and efficient Vera Rubin is: that it does far more work for the same amount of cooling.
Sensationalism wins
And should I call out the fact that LinkedIn posts that offer a pragmatic take on AI fare poorly? Instead, it's those breathless, exuberant posts, many completely written by AI, that get crazy engagement.
Never mind that I can't quite figure out what they are actually trying to say.
Finally, did you know that RAM prices for computers and laptops are already soaring, as memory makers shift production lines to more lucrative products like the HBM memory used by AI GPUs? Here's the best summation of the RAM situation that I've come across.
In a nutshell, this is the state of AI euphoria today.
Have you encountered AI euphoria yourself? I'd love to hear about it - just hit reply to this email.
Regards,
Paul Mah
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