A cooling & temperature story that repeats across data centers in 2025–2026 — not a spreadsheet, a shift handover.
● Friday · 23:47 · Alert received
Duty engineer James sees hall averages in range — but rack A-14 inlet crept +4°C over 48h. The CDU was still on a static setpoint; chilled water couldn't follow the AI GPU load. The CDU trips. Cooling plant lags; a thermal cascade starts. Dashboards stayed green on coarse metrics.
MTTR: 4.2 hours. Revenue impact: $10M. Thermal stress on adjacent racks had been building for six weeks — invisible without per-rack temperature & cooling telemetry tied to operations.
⟶ The temperature story was in the data. Cooling policy wasn’t. Ops had no unified thermal + chiller view.
$2.4M
Thermal incidents = downtime $
When cooling can’t follow heat, incidents cascade. Average MTTR 4+ hours — often while operators still lack per-rack temperature forensics. SLA breaches, throttled GPUs, emergency plant runs.
↗ Gartner · Tier-3+ facilities · 2025–2026
40%
Cooling energy & setpoints
Chillers and CRACs follow fixed schedules while GPU load swings hour by hour. Without ML on temperature & plant data, operations over-cools “just in case” — burning power and masking hotspots.
↗ ASHRAE DC Energy Study · 2025–2026
Zero
Ops & maintenance blind spots
Work orders follow calendar rules, not thermal reality. No single view of rack temps, CDU health, and cooling plant margin — so operations teams chase alarms instead of preventing thermal debt.
↗ Operator interviews · CIS & EU · 2025–2026