Purpose-built for High-Density and HPC Workloads, the Libertyville Facility Helps Enterprises Build, Validate and Deploy Production-Ready Infrastructure Faster and With Less Risk
LIBERTYVILLE, Ill., May 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — AHEAD, a leading provider of advanced enterprise AI Infrastructure, today officially opened its new air- and liquid-cooled rack integration facility at its Libertyville campus.
Purpose-built for high-density AI and high-performance computing workloads, the facility helps enterprises move from AI strategy to operational reality by enabling them to build, validate and deploy production-ready infrastructure faster and with less risk.
As enterprise AI investment accelerates, organizations are facing a fundamental challenge: the infrastructure required for modern GPU-intensive workloads is complex, energy-demanding, and difficult to scale. AHEAD’s new facility addresses that challenge by helping enterprises deploy production-ready AI capacity faster, more efficiently, and with lower risk.
“This facility is about helping our clients move from AI strategy to AI execution,” said Dan Adamany, CEO and founder of AHEAD. “The technology is powerful, but deploying it at scale is where many enterprises stall. We built this facility to help clients turn AI plans into production-ready infrastructure faster, with greater confidence and less risk.”
The new building expands AHEAD’s Libertyville campus to more than 350,000 square feet dedicated to server and rack integration, warehousing, and global logistics. At the heart of the facility is a scalable 10MW integration environment built to support increasingly dense AI infrastructure, with individual racks already exceeding 100kW and quickly advancing toward 250kW and beyond. Repurposed from a former plastic injection molding facility, the site increases AHEAD’s integration capacity without requiring new construction or additional power.
Unlike traditional deployment models where hardware arrives unconfigured and must be assembled on-site, the facility enables full rack-scale integration prior to delivery. Systems are installed, cabled, configured, and rigorously tested before shipping, reducing client deployment timelines from months to weeks, while dramatically minimizing risk.
The facility also supports a range of cooling approaches, including air cooling, rear-door heat exchangers, and single-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling. By transferring heat directly from high-powered components to liquid coolant, these systems enable more efficient and reliable operation of next-generation infrastructure. Designed with a closed-loop cooling approach and engineered to operate within local sound requirements, the facility reflects AHEAD’s focus on operational efficiency and responsible facility design.
In addition to its integration capabilities, the site features an expanded Innovation Lab with deployment-grade digital twins built on NVIDIA Omniverse™, allowing clients to benchmark and optimize infrastructure across compute, storage, networking and AI workloads. The lab is designed as a real-world proving ground where organizations can design, build, test, and validate next-generation infrastructure before deploying it in their own environments.
“The biggest bottleneck in enterprise AI today isn’t the model — it’s the six months of infrastructure chaos that happens before it ever runs,” said Eric Kaplan, CTO of AHEAD. “We built this facility so that our clients can find out what breaks in our building, not theirs. That’s how organizations get from pilot to production faster, and without a lengthy trial and error phase.”
Today’s opening will be celebrated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by employees, customers, partners, and local leaders at 2 p.m. CDT.
Beyond its technical capabilities, the facility reinforces Libertyville’s role as a growing hub for advanced technology and engineering.
“Libertyville has been a strong partner for AHEAD, and this facility reflects the talent, infrastructure and community we’ve found here,” continued Adamany. “This is a facility built in Libertyville to serve enterprises everywhere.”
For more information on how AHEAD and its expanded Libertyville campus can help organizations accelerate AI infrastructure deployment, please click here.
About AHEAD
AHEAD accelerates strategy into execution by engineering integrated solutions across infrastructure, applications, data, and security. The company builds and manages digital platforms that power transformation for leading enterprises, modernizing platforms and workflows and applying AI to unlock the full impact of people and technology—building what others only blueprint. For more information on AHEAD, please visit our website at https://www.ahead.com/, or follow us on LinkedIn.
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