Emergence and Expansion of Liquid Cooling in Mainstream Data Centers

The IT industry is at a performance inflection point. When purchasing a new computing device, it is expected to be more powerful than the previous generation. As for servers, over the last decade the industry had a period where significant performance increases were delivered, generation over generation, accompanied by modest and predictable power increases. That period ended around 2018. Large power increases in the compute, memory, and storage subsystems of current and future IT equipment are already challenging data centers, especially those with short refresh cycles. The challenges will only increase. Liquid cooling is becoming a requirement in some cases, and should be strongly and quickly considered. This paper explains why liquid cooling should be considered, rather than the details around what liquid cooling is or how to deploy it.