Immersion liquid cooling solutions are poised to gain ground in datacenter applications as major international datacenter operators and server processor vendors are all aggressively trying such solutions to meet the growing ESG (environmental, social and governance) trend and strengthen thermal management at cloud servers, according to industry sources.
Datacenter operators in the US and China are all testing immersion liquid cooling systems and will officially incorporate the systems sooner or later. Server processor vendors Intel, AMD and Nvidia are also actively developing efficient thermal management solutions to support their new offerings with ever-advancing computing performance, the sources said.
Intel, for instance, has entered into cooperation with US-based GRC to test the safety and reliability of immersion liquid cooling technologies and establish ways to optimize system performance of immersion-cooled racks containing Intel Xeon scalable processors, in order to best meet the needs of end-customers, the sources said.
Statistics from Deloitte & Touche show that global datacenters together consume 198 billion kWh a year, accounting for 2% of global power consumption, and the percentage will rise year by year as more datacenters are under construction. Synergy Research tallies also indicate that there were 597 large-size datacenters in active operations by early 2021, and the number will exceed 1,000 in three years.
With the expansion of datacenters worldwide, operators will face increasingly strict restrictions on power consumption. China, for instance, has requested that the power usage effectiveness (PUE) rate for any new large-size datacenter under construction should be lower than 1.4, compared to 1.8 for existing ones already in use, the sources said. And the PUE requirement for new datacenters can only be fulfilled with the adoption of immersion liquid cooling systems that can improve PUE to 1.12, the sources added.
The Information & Communications Research Laboratories under the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) noted that if measured by TCO (total cost of ownership), installing immersion liquid cooling solutions will increase cost by 8% but can save energy consumption by 44%, indicating that the installation cost can be recouped in 1.18 years.
Meanwhile, Taiwan's Kaori Heat Treatment noted that it has started shipments of immersion liquid cooling racks to datacenter clients, believing that shipments will grow steadily in the years to come.
