Chris Coates

Overview

Chris Coates is Principal Solutions Architect at Nscale, leading the technical design of Nscale's modular, reference-architecture-based approach to liquid-cooled AI data center deployments. At OCP Global Summit 2025 he provided the operator perspective on deploying Lenovo Neptune at scale, articulating the economic and operational rationale for speed, standardization, and disposable infrastructure. He identified three historical risks when entering liquid cooling (vendor lock-in, serviceability, and the "snowflake problem") and explained how NVIDIA and Lenovo reference architectures have substantially mitigated them. He argues for "inside-out" minimum viable builds with fiber-reinforced polymer and an 18-month refresh cycle assumption aligned with US DoE guidance.