AHEAD Opens 10MW Liquid-Cooled Integration Facility to Power Enterprise AI Factories

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- AHEAD, a leading integrator of advanced data center and AI infrastructure, today announced the April 2026 opening of its new 10‑megawatt, liquid‑cooled rack integration facility on its Libertyville, Ill. campus. Purpose‑built for high‑density AI and high‑performance computing (HPC) workloads, this scalable facility is designed to help enterprises stand up NVIDIA‑accelerated AI factories faster, with less risk and greater efficiency.

The new facility expands AHEAD's Libertyville campus to more than 350,000 square feet of warehousing, integration, and logistics space, including a dedicated to air‑ and liquid‑cooled rack integration and a 40‑rack Innovation Lab for hands‑on AI infrastructure benchmarking. The facility is engineered to support the next generation of GPU‑dense architectures, including NVIDIA AI Factory systems and future NVIDIA AI infrastructure such as NVIDIA Blackwell and NVIDIA Vera Rubin based platforms.

"As AI and high‑performance computing workloads push rack densities into territory that traditional air‑cooled environments simply weren't designed for, enterprises need partners who can make the physics and the operations work at scale," said Chris Tucker, executive vice president of AHEAD Foundry. "This facility lets us build, configure, and test fully integrated, liquid‑cooled racks at industrial scale so clients can add AI capacity in weeks instead of quarters—without reinventing every data center from the ground up."

Facility Specifications

The Libertyville liquid‑cooled integration facility includes:

• 10MW baseline of available power dedicated to rack‑scale AI and HPC integration projects, with capacity to scale.
• Approximately 75,000 square feet of purpose‑built rack integration space as part of AHEAD's 350,000‑square‑foot Foundry campus.
• Capacity to build, configure, and test air‑ and direct‑to‑chip liquid‑cooled racks, supporting multi‑rack and data center–scale deployments.
• Support for air, rear‑door heat exchanger (RDHx), and single‑phase direct‑to‑chip liquid cooling, tuned for racks that routinely exceed 100kW and will soon push toward 250kW and beyond.
• A scalable Innovation Lab with 5X capacity of the current lab, featuring a digital twin designed to test, validate, and benchmark air, direct-to-chip liquid, and hybrid cooling solutions across state-of-the-art AI and HPC platforms, including storage, networking, and cloud-scale workloads.
• Rack scale hardware integration, pre‑deployment logical configuration, cabling and labeling, burn‑in, and validation, with white‑glove shipping and global logisticscoordinated through the AHEAD Hatch lifecycle platform.

Configuration as a Built‑In Advantage

Unlike traditional models where unconfigured hardware is shipped directly to customer data centers, AHEAD consolidates design, configuration, integration, and validation inside its Foundry facilities. A pre-integrated rack solution ships with equipment installed, cabled, labeled, tested, and pre-configured, delivering faster deployment and lower on-site risk with minimal last-mile effort.

Because configuration is part of the integration process—not an afterthought—clients gain:

• Faster time to value, with racks that roll into the data center and can be online in days.
• Higher reliability, with hardware, firmware, configuration, power, and connectivity issues resolved before shipment.
• Lifecycle visibility, with Hatch providing asset‑level data throughout the integration process across thousands of devices and components.

This integration‑first approach is a key differentiator for AHEAD in the rapidly evolving market for AI‑ready data center infrastructure.

Supporting Enterprise AI Factory Initiatives

The new facility is a physical engine for enterprise AI factory programs—helping organizations design, build, and scale standardized AI platforms that move beyond pilots to production. AHEAD leverages its Foundry integration centers, AI engineering expertise, and NVIDIA technology to deliver full‑stack platforms spanning compute, networking, storage, security, and operations for regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, life sciences, and research universities.

Alignment with the NVIDIA AI Factory Vision

AHEAD is an Elite Partner in the NVIDIA Partner Network. Additionally, AHEAD was recognized as the 2025 NVIDIA Americas Rising Star Partner of the Year. The Libertyville facility is designed to support NVIDIA AI Factory deployments for NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NVIDIA AI infrastructure, including Blackwell‑based systems, Vera Rubin‑based systems, NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet and NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking with rack‑scale integration, liquid cooling, and validation services.

"Enterprises need AI factories that are powerful and practical in real-world data centers," said Craig Weinstein, vice president, Americas Partner Organization at NVIDIA. "Our work to combine the full-stack NVIDIA AI platform with AHEAD's new liquid-cooled facilities provides a trusted pathway for customers to rapidly design and implement these next-generation AI factories."

AHEAD at NVIDIA GTC 2026

AHEAD will showcase its AI factory offerings and integration capabilities as a Platinum Sponsor of NVIDIA GTC 2026, taking place March 16–19, 2026, at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif.

Attendees can:

• Visit AHEAD Booth #907 in the Expo Hall to see NVIDIA‑powered AI factory demos and meet with Foundry, AI, and security experts.
• Attend AHEAD's sponsored breakout session with Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) on scaling trusted, hybrid NVIDIA AI platforms in financial services (Session S82117).

About AHEAD
AHEAD accelerates strategy into execution by engineering integrated solutions across infrastructure, applications, data, and security. We modernize platforms and workflows, applying AI to unlock the full impact of people and technology—building what others only blueprint.

SOURCE AHEAD