UK university Imperial College London has selected Digital Realty’s data center in Woking, Surrey, for a liquid-cooled HPC deployment.

The high-performance computing cluster is Imperial’s first direct liquid-cooled installation, and is part of its Imperial College Intel Corporation Lenovo (ICICLE) initiative that sets out the university’s ambitions for HPC and AI capabilities.

The compute capacity of the cluster and the hardware used were not shared. DCD has contacted Imperial for more information.

A contract for the cluster was first signed in July 2025, with a fully operational environment handed over to Imperial in Q4 2025. This involved structural floor reinforcement, installation of Lenovo’s direct liquid-cooling infrastructure, system integration, and commissioning, all of which were handled by Digital Realty.

The cluster will be used to enable Imperial researchers to train larger and more complex AI models, support acceleration of data-intensive simulations, and help shorten the time from discovery to real-world impact across disciplines ranging from drug discovery and robotics to climate modeling and advanced materials.

“This deployment demonstrates what can be achieved when leading academic institutions, a global technology powerhouse, and digital infrastructure providers work closely together,” said Séamus Dunne, managing director, UK & Ireland, Digital Realty.

“Imperial’s research ambitions require an environment designed for extreme performance, resilience, and sustainability, and we are proud to provide that platform at our Woking data center.”

Imperial CIO Jenny Rae added: “Advanced digital infrastructure is now as critical to research as laboratories and instrumentation. This deployment gives our researchers access to the scale and performance they need to tackle some of the most complex scientific and societal challenges.

“Working with Digital Realty provides us with a secure, resilient, and sustainable platform, while Lenovo’s direct liquid-cooled technology allows us to grow our AI capabilities responsibly. Together with our technology partners, we are building an environment that will serve Imperial’s research community for many years to come.”

Woking is Digital Realty’s largest London campus, designed to meet the needs of AI infrastructure and supporting rack densities of more than 100kW. The facility, dubbed LGW14, has 200,000 sq ft (18,580 sqm) of data center space across three stories.

DCD previously interviewed Imperial College London’s CIO, Jenny Rae. The university has a varied IT footprint, including some on-prem compute, a cloud computing presence, and leases space at Virtus’ London 4 data center.

It previously had two Nvidia-powered clusters – CX3 and HX1. CX3 is the primary cluster, with a total of 408 nodes, 48,384 cores, 717.5TB RAM, 56 L40S, and 88 Quadro (Turing) RTX 6000s, while HX1 has 303 compute nodes, 19,512 cores, 159TB of RAM, and 60 A100 GPUs.