What if the biggest barrier to scaling liquid cooling isn't the engineering, but an industry-wide habit of keeping things secret that don't need to be kept secret?

In this episode, Bill Kosik of HED and chair of The Green Grid's AI Impacts working group joins Robert for a genuinely insightful conversation about the long view of data centre design, and why the lessons from IBM's water-cooled mainframes still apply to today's 300kW racks.

From his time at Hewlett Packard's facilities design group working on liquid-cooled supercomputing, to leading mission critical projects at HED today, Bill brings three decades of pragmatism to an industry that often confuses novelty with progress.

Together, they explore:

• Why liquid cooling isn't new technology and what the 1980s mainframe era can still teach us
• How the manufacturers stepping up with full liquid-cooled product suites unlocked the current scale
• The inflexion points reshaping cooling design, from 5kW cabinets a decade ago to 300kW racks today
• Why the industry's culture of secrecy is fuelling public misunderstanding around water use, noise and vibration
• How global end users, not just regulators, are driving sustainability standards in the United States
• The retrofit opportunity hiding in Tier IV enterprise data centres being repurposed for small-scale AI
• Why ASHRAE 90.4 becoming part of energy code means you can't design around it anymore
• The case for designing data centres that don't look like distribution warehouses

If you've ever wondered whether 300kW racks will one day feel as routine as 30kW racks do now, or wanted someone to put today's AI build-out in proper historical context, Bill delivers the kind of measured engineering wisdom that's increasingly rare in a hype-driven market.

His take? In five years we'll be sitting around laughing at how we didn't know how to cool a 300kW rack. The history of this industry is one of inflexion points, and the people who recognise them early are the ones who shape what comes next.