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Five Reasons Data Center Liquid Cooling Is on the Rise

Excerpt Article

Published By: Data Center Knowledge

Written By: Mary Branscombe | Jul 23, 2018

Liquid cooling is poised to make its way into more data centers. Here’s why. Traditionally reserved for mainframes and academic supercomputers, liquid cooling may soon be seeping into more enterprise data centers. New, more demanding enterprise workloads are pushing up power densities, leaving data center managers looking for more efficient alternatives to air-based cooling systems.

Hyperscale cloud operators, including Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google, Facebook, and Baidu, have formed a group working on an open specification for liquid-cooled server racks without saying that exactly they would use them for. At least one category of workloads in the hyperscalers’ arsenal, however, clearly calls for liquid cooling: machine learning systems accelerated by GPUs, or, in Google’s case, also TPUs, which the company has said publicly are now cooled using a direct-to-chip liquid cooling design.