Data Centre Cooling Failure & Power Resilience: Lessons from the CME Outage

The recent cooling failure at CyrusOne’s Chicago-area (Aurora, Illinois) Data Centre, which crippled the CME Group’s trading platform, sent a shockwave through the global financial sector.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, price discovery ground to a halt.
The cause wasn’t a sophisticated cyberattack or a complex software glitch, it was a fundamental failure in the support infrastructure.

For engineers, consultants, and operators of mission-critical facilities, this incident is a stark reminder that in high-stakes environments, data centre power resilience is as vital as digital security.

When cooling or power systems fail, market risk becomes a reality. At Baudouin, we analyse these events through a technical lens to help our partners move beyond “theoretical uptime” toward true data centre power resilience.

System-Level MTBF: Why the Power Chain Is the Weakest Link

We often discuss Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) in the context of individual components. However, system-level MTBF is unforgiving.

If your power topology contains a single bottleneck, a chiller plant, a pump room, or an LV/MV switchgear, the entire system’s reliability collapses to the MTBF of that one element.

For Tier III and Tier IV Data Centres, achieving “five-nines” (99.999 %) availability requires looking at the interconnectedness of the power and cooling chains.

Generally, a generator that starts flawlessly is irrelevant if the cooling system it supports has a single point of failure preventing it from shedding the thermal load of IT equipment.

In essence, power resilience is only as strong as the weakest link in your cooling and electrical topology.

Data Centre Generator Topology: N+1 vs 2N Architectures

Reliability isn’t only about the quality of the generator, it’s about backup power topology.

To mitigate the risks highlighted by the CME outage, high-availability workloads demand architectures built for redundancy and path diversity:

Independent Cooling Trains: N+1, 2N, or 2N+1 configurations ensure no single plant failure can take the facility offline.
Path Diversity: Multiple, isolated power and cooling paths from the utility and Data Centre Generators all the way to the rack level.
Active/Active Failover: Hot-standby infrastructure across multiple sites, validated through rigorous failover testing.

Topology design determines operational resilience. A perfectly specified component means little inside a fragile architecture.

AI, HPC and Liquid Cooling: The Shrinking Safety Margin

The rise of AI, GPU-driven workloads, and High-Performance Computing (HPC) is pushing rack densities to unprecedented levels, 80 to 120 kW per rack in modern hyperscale facilities.

In addition, this density leaves operators with a shrinking safety margin and heavier stress on both chillers and generator sets.

Cooling systems are the largest electrical load after IT equipment.

A robust backup power system is essential to restart chillers and pumps immediately after a grid failure to prevent thermal runaway.

As AI and HPC continue to evolve, liquid-cooling power requirements demand tighter integration between electrical and thermal systems.

Understanding this relationship between cooling and power resilience is crucial for maintaining Tier IV-level reliability.

Baudouin’s PowerGen Solutions for Data Centre Power Resilience

At Baudouin, we design Power Generation solutions that integrate seamlessly into the topologies required by Uptime Institute Tier III and Tier IV standards.

Our focus goes far beyond simple kW ratings:

Redundancy by Design: Multiple generator sets operating in parallel improve system MTBF and remove single points of failure.
Architectural Compatibility: Baudouin Data Centre Generators fit naturally into 2N and 2N+1 architectures, maintaining redundancy from fuel tank to alternator.
Mission-Critical Performance: Our PowerKit solutions deliver the transient response required to keep cooling systems active and IT loads stable during utility outages.
Sustainability: Baudouin’s gensets are HVO100-ready, enabling operators to reduce emissions without compromising performance.

Together, these capabilities empower operators to achieve resilient data-centre power that supports growth in AI, cloud, and HPC environments.

A Question for Operators

The CME incident shows that a technical fault can become a business continuity event capable of shaking market confidence and brand reputation.
As you scale to meet GPU-intensive and AI-driven power demands, ask yourself:

How often do you stress-test your power and cooling topology against your actual redundancy, resilience, and availability targets?

So, if your goal is Tier III or Tier IV resilience, your backup power must be as robust as the mission-critical loads it protects.