CME Outage Shows Challenge of Cooling Data Centers: QuickTake

When a data center cooling issue halted futures and options trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, it focused attention on the hidden infrastructure that’s becoming ever more critical to daily life: data centers. These facilities are essential for everything from commodities trading to uploading the photos on your smartphone to the cloud.

They’re also at the heart of the hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into artificial intelligence, enthusiasm for which has helped turn Nvidia Corp. into the world’s most valuable public company.

But storing and processing large volumes of data generates massive amounts of heat. Keeping data centers cool ...