Avayla and OCP Redefine Cooling Standards for the AI Age
The current speed of the data center industry’s transformation is unlike any in its history. Where infrastructure upgrades once followed multiyear cycles, the pace now is annual, at the speed of consumer electronics. My recent conversation with Kelley Mullick, CEO and founder of Avayla, at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose revealed how liquid cooling has moved from niche application to critical infrastructure component, and why standardization will determine whether the industry can meet the moment.
During our TechArena Data Insights episode with Solidigm’s Jeniece Wnorowski, Kelley shared insights from her extensive career in cooling technologies and her current role as chair of OCP’s industry liaison team. Her perspective illuminates both the technical challenges operators face and the collaborative frameworks emerging to address them.
Rapid Adoption Reshapes the Market
As data centers continue to evolve in the race to support AI-enabled workloads, Kelley noted that scalability has emerged as the primary challenge facing operators today. During our conversation, she cited an OCP keynote by Meta’s head of infrastructure, Dan Rabinovitsj. What once took multiple years now happens annually, leading him to compare current deployment cadences to consumer electronics rather than traditional data center timelines. “That was a big insight for me,” she said. “I live and breathe in this space, but it is a real insight to make that comparison.”
With this primary challenge of scalability come a host of secondary challenges, including cooling this infrastructure, and preparing for liquid cooling. Before 2022, more than 90% of data centers relied on traditional air cooling. In just two years, liquid cooling adoption has surged to approximately 30% of the market. This rapid acceleration has driven significant growth in coolant distribution units (CDUs), the critical infrastructure components that deliver coolant from chips to distribution systems. Recognizing this need, at the 2025 global summit, OCP announced a new working group focused on CDU specifications and best practices.
Driving Standards Development with Industry Partnerships
As the industry faces these challenges, collaboration and defining industry standards become more important than ever. At OCP, Kelley is chair of an industry liaison team that connects external standards organizations to OCP. This year, the team had two announcements to make. First, OCP and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) signed a memorandum of understanding, establishing formal collaboration to eliminate duplicative efforts and create clearer pathways for standards development. In addition, a new liaison role connects OCP directly into ASHRAE’s processes, ensuring thermal management standards align with open infrastructure development. Second, ASTM International launched a new subcommittee on insulating fluids for immersion cooling applications, with a member of the industry liaison team working with that organization as well.
In another example of the importance of collaboration, Kelley highlighted the Universal Quick Disconnect (UQD) specification 2.0, which addresses quick disconnects within the cold plate cooling loop from the chip to the CDU.
“We had many different technologies…There was also a lot of proprietary designs, and this was creating a lot of problems and challenges within the industry,” she said. “Specification 2.0 was one of the first within liquid cooling to come out and really make standards more readily available to address the challenge of interoperability and heterogeneity within the data center.”
Embracing Hybrid Approaches to Liquid Cooling
Looking ahead, Kelley sees a future that will likely involve hybrid cooling strategies rather than single-solution deployments. While direct-to-chip cooling currently dominates new deployments, Kelley anticipates growing adoption of immersion cooling as workloads demand complete thermal management for entire compute stacks. Cooling networking equipment, memory modules, and storage alongside compute will become increasingly important. Immersion cooling’s ability to capture 100% of generated heat makes it a valuable complement to direct-to-chip solutions, particularly interest in heat recapture and reuse rises.
The TechArena Take
As AI-enhanced workloads continue driving unprecedented infrastructure demands, the industry’s ability to standardize rapidly will determine whether operators can deploy at scale while maintaining flexibility for future innovation. Kelley Mullick’s leadership in standards development through OCP demonstrates how open collaboration can accelerate adoption while maintaining interoperability. Organizations that engage with standards bodies today and build relationships across the ecosystem will be best positioned to capitalize on the liquid cooling transition reshaping data center design.
For more information about Avayla, visit avayla.net. To learn about OCP’s Cooling Environments working group and standards development, visit the OCP wiki.
The current speed of the data center industry’s transformation is unlike any in its history. Where infrastructure upgrades once followed multiyear cycles, the pace now is annual, at the speed of consumer electronics. My recent conversation with Kelley Mullick, CEO and founder of Avayla, at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose revealed how liquid cooling has moved from niche application to critical infrastructure component, and why standardization will determine whether the industry can meet the moment.
During our TechArena Data Insights episode with Solidigm’s Jeniece Wnorowski, Kelley shared insights from her extensive career in cooling technologies and her current role as chair of OCP’s industry liaison team. Her perspective illuminates both the technical challenges operators face and the collaborative frameworks emerging to address them.
Rapid Adoption Reshapes the Market
As data centers continue to evolve in the race to support AI-enabled workloads, Kelley noted that scalability has emerged as the primary challenge facing operators today. During our conversation, she cited an OCP keynote by Meta’s head of infrastructure, Dan Rabinovitsj. What once took multiple years now happens annually, leading him to compare current deployment cadences to consumer electronics rather than traditional data center timelines. “That was a big insight for me,” she said. “I live and breathe in this space, but it is a real insight to make that comparison.”
With this primary challenge of scalability come a host of secondary challenges, including cooling this infrastructure, and preparing for liquid cooling. Before 2022, more than 90% of data centers relied on traditional air cooling. In just two years, liquid cooling adoption has surged to approximately 30% of the market. This rapid acceleration has driven significant growth in coolant distribution units (CDUs), the critical infrastructure components that deliver coolant from chips to distribution systems. Recognizing this need, at the 2025 global summit, OCP announced a new working group focused on CDU specifications and best practices.
Driving Standards Development with Industry Partnerships
As the industry faces these challenges, collaboration and defining industry standards become more important than ever. At OCP, Kelley is chair of an industry liaison team that connects external standards organizations to OCP. This year, the team had two announcements to make. First, OCP and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) signed a memorandum of understanding, establishing formal collaboration to eliminate duplicative efforts and create clearer pathways for standards development. In addition, a new liaison role connects OCP directly into ASHRAE’s processes, ensuring thermal management standards align with open infrastructure development. Second, ASTM International launched a new subcommittee on insulating fluids for immersion cooling applications, with a member of the industry liaison team working with that organization as well.
In another example of the importance of collaboration, Kelley highlighted the Universal Quick Disconnect (UQD) specification 2.0, which addresses quick disconnects within the cold plate cooling loop from the chip to the CDU.
“We had many different technologies…There was also a lot of proprietary designs, and this was creating a lot of problems and challenges within the industry,” she said. “Specification 2.0 was one of the first within liquid cooling to come out and really make standards more readily available to address the challenge of interoperability and heterogeneity within the data center.”
Embracing Hybrid Approaches to Liquid Cooling
Looking ahead, Kelley sees a future that will likely involve hybrid cooling strategies rather than single-solution deployments. While direct-to-chip cooling currently dominates new deployments, Kelley anticipates growing adoption of immersion cooling as workloads demand complete thermal management for entire compute stacks. Cooling networking equipment, memory modules, and storage alongside compute will become increasingly important. Immersion cooling’s ability to capture 100% of generated heat makes it a valuable complement to direct-to-chip solutions, particularly interest in heat recapture and reuse rises.
The TechArena Take
As AI-enhanced workloads continue driving unprecedented infrastructure demands, the industry’s ability to standardize rapidly will determine whether operators can deploy at scale while maintaining flexibility for future innovation. Kelley Mullick’s leadership in standards development through OCP demonstrates how open collaboration can accelerate adoption while maintaining interoperability. Organizations that engage with standards bodies today and build relationships across the ecosystem will be best positioned to capitalize on the liquid cooling transition reshaping data center design.
For more information about Avayla, visit avayla.net. To learn about OCP’s Cooling Environments working group and standards development, visit the OCP wiki.
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