Blog articles by Austin Hipes
From Challenge to Breakthrough: A Joint Engineering Story on AI Infrastructure Immersion Cooling, Power Density, and Thermal Limits
A deep look at how Denvr and UNICOM Engineering built and validated production-ready immersion-cooled AI infrastructure, overcoming thermal limits to deliver de...
Flawless Execution: Breaking Down Liquid and Immersion Cooling
Austin Hipes, Chief Technologist and VP Engineering for UNICOM Engineering, explains the process, advantages, and efficiencies of liquid and immersion cooling f...
Videos featuring Austin Hipes
Community Update Immersion IT Equipment ITE Workstreams Update
OCP Immersion Cooling updates for the IT Equipment (ITE) Committee. This presentation includes the statuses and updates for Signal Integrity, Advanced Cooling, ...
Immersion Server Demonstrated Reliability at Datacenter Scale Deployment
This presentation details the real-world reliability of over 3,000 immersion-cooled Intel servers over a 30-month period. We will compare component-level failur...
IT Equipment in Immersion Cooling, Design and Validation Guidelines
Development of IT equipment for immersion cooling environments has its own specific needs and challenges. This session will focus on standards development for d...
Austin Hipes bio
Austin Hipes is Chief Technologist and Vice President of Engineering at UNICOM Engineering, where he leads Product Development, IT Infrastructure, Regulatory Services, and Sales Engineering. He plays a central role in shaping the design, validation, and delivery of complex systems, working closely with both customers and partners to turn evolving technology into production-ready solutions.
With more than 25 years of experience, Austin brings a deep understanding of infrastructure across network equipment providers, enterprise storage, hyperconverged systems, and carrier-grade deployments. His work spans both technical architecture and strategic execution, helping organizations move from early design through deployment and long-term scale.
Areas of Expertise
- OEM platform design
- AI and data center infrastructure
- Advanced cooling strategies, including liquid and immersion
- Carrier-grade and high-availability systems
- Hardware validation, certification, and lifecycle management
- Regulatory and compliance requirements
- Carrier-grade and high-availability systems
Industry Leadership
Austin is an active contributor to industry initiatives shaping the future of data center infrastructure and thermal management:
- Chair, Technical Committee for IT Equipment (ITE), OCP Cooling Environments Immersion Group
- Member, IT Advisory Council (ITAC), Dell Technologies
- Member, Intel Channel Board of Advisors (BOA) for Datacenter & AI (DCAI), North America