Data center liquid cooling market heats up

Single-phase DLC deployments are scaling first, Beran said. “This is the result of long-standing adoption in the high-performance computing industry that has helped establish a more mature vendor ecosystem and end-user know-how to deploy and service the technology, Beran said. 

Single-phase DLC is the leading data center liquid cooling technology, and that’s expected to continue throughout the five-year forecast period, Behran said. However, two-phase DLC is forecast to materially grow during the forecast period, Behran said. Ultimately, fluid innovation is going to play a big part in how successful immersion cooling will be, Beran said.

In terms of data center liquid-cooling revenues in 2023, CoolIT Systems, Boyd, and Motivair are the top three vendors, Beran said. He noted, too, that Nvidia has specified single-phase DLC as the cooling technology to support its upcoming GB200 compute nodes.

The high end of the Nvidia GB200 lineup, the NVL72 system is a 72-node, liquid-cooled, rack-scale system for the most compute-intensive workloads. Each DGX GB200 system features 36 Grace Blackwell Superchips — which include 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs — connected by the newest generation NVLink interconnect technology.

The third technology forecast in the Dell’Oro report – immersive cooling – involves physically submerging servers, networking or other gear directly into a non-conducting liquid which acts as a coolant, directly absorbing heat generated by the components and transferring it away from the equipment. Immersion cooling technology supports higher server densities in a data center compared to traditional air cooling.

“There’s a lot of interest in immersion cooling because, from an engineering perspective, that’s going to give you that best thermal management performance. [It delivers] a better thermal management performance than direct-to-chip liquid cooling, because there’s no air cooling associated with it, and you can capture nearly 100% of the heat generated by the server. So, that immediately sets businesses up for the opportunity to achieve the best energy efficiency,” Beran said.