Emergence Quantum deploys cryogenic cooling technology at AirTrunk (Macquarie Technology) data center, advancing liquid cooling adoption for AI infrastructure.

Australian-founded startup Emergence Quantum (EQ) has partnered with hyperscale data centre specialist AirTrunk to deploy cryogenic cooling—a standard technique in quantum computing—within next-generation data centres. Cryogenic cooling enhances the speed and energy efficiency of silicon chips, enabling faster computation with reduced power consumption. This technology also serves as a foundation for advanced computing architectures, including quantum systems.

Beyond hardware performance gains, the partnership will focus on cryogenic technologies designed to significantly reduce data centre cooling water requirements. Concurrently, the technology facilitates gigawatt-scale energy storage, improving the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources. These advancements carry significant implications for data centre operations, according to EQ co-founder and CEO Professor David Reilly.

“It’s been understood for decades that computers run significantly faster and more efficiently in the cold, but there are challenges and costs to cooling that have so-far limited this approach to niche applications,” he noted. “The scale of data centres and tiny size of transistors today changes all that — the cryo-computing epoch has arrived.”

This shift positions Australia’s existing expertise in large-scale cryogenic industries, such as liquefied natural gas (LNG) and hydrogen, as a critical foundation for future quantum and artificial intelligence infrastructure. EQ head of cryogenics Dr Arman Siahvashi emphasized that this advantage extends to the country’s abundant renewable resources and extensive experience in clean energy and decarbonisation.

“Quantum at scale will require cryogenics at scale,” he said. “By bridging expertise across the energy and quantum sectors, we can enable next-generation quantum data centres and future-proof Australia’s leading position in AI, quantum and clean technology.”

Spun out of the University of Sydney in 2025, EQ highlighted during the NSW parliamentary inquiry into data centres in early July that facilities should not be viewed merely as large power consumers. Instead, they should form integral components of the infrastructure supporting Australia’s emerging AI, advanced computing, and quantum industries, noted Reilly alongside EQ co-founder, CTO, and CSO Thomas Ohki. Both possess three decades of industry experience, including academic tenures at the University of Sydney.

“The first is that data centres and the technology that underpins them is very much in a state of flux,” said Reilly. “It is not business as usual. It is not a steady-state situation at the moment, but the rapid growth driven by AI, driven by cloud applications through the pandemic, has created a situation where we’re living in a brute-force era.”

Growing concerns over the resources required to sustain this expansion are becoming increasingly prominent. For Reilly, this underscores that current investments in data centres and AI will ultimately dictate who owns and controls future computing infrastructure.

“We see totally different technologies in the coming years as becoming critically important in a data centre environment, and redefining what a data centre is,” he added. “Whether that’s the fundamental material systems that transistors are built from, the architectures, the communication systems [and] can include infrastructure like power distribution, energy storage, the thermal management, and the cooling infrastructure.”

According to Ohki, this long-term perspective explains why his team has spent decades developing various cryogenic computing platforms. “For us, cryogenic data centres are an inevitable reality — this cooling technology is needed for high-speed efficient silicon chips, superconducting logic, and ultimately quantum computing,” he said. “All flavours of qubits need cryogenics one way or another.”

AirTrunk innovation strategy manager Harshit Sharma emphasized that integrating quantum computing into a data centre involves far more than simply placing a physics experiment in a data hall. “At scale, these systems will require extensive cryo-cooling infrastructure,” he added. “This partnership is looking to deploy that cryo-infrastructure in a way that improves the performance of today’s silicon chips, all-the-while paving the road to quantum.”