Cooling the Future: Where Does Cold Plate End and Immersion Begin?
I recently visited a customer whose AI racks were reaching 750–800W per slot. Their data center layout couldn’t push more airflow so they were in hot pursuit, no pun intended, of cold plate cooling alternatives. But as they forecasted system power forward, they saw a near term horizon where cold plate technology may not provide enough thermal mitigation to address their dense infrastructure demands. They faced the question of migration to cold plate now knowing that another technology migration may be required in the future, or take the plunge into immersion cooling now.
This customer is not alone. We have reached the choke point of air cooling within highly dense data center infrastructure, and more deployments are reaching for liquid cooling solutions. Today, that liquid cooling alternative is likely a cold plate solution, delivering the right mix of cooling efficiency and required thermal control. And while this transition is playing out in data centers today, many are asking how long cold plate solutions will keep pace with data center requirements. After all, today’s racks are climbing past 1 megawatt with data center facilities scaling past 1 gigawatt representing unprecedented heat to mitigate. This leads to the question of how long cold plate’s day in the sun will last before immersion cooling becomes a required alternative.
But what is cold plate? Cold plate solutions offer controlled liquid to chip and handle thermal densities significantly better than air cooling alternatives. Many HPC and AI boxes today already support cold plate solutions. It’s relatively mature, perceived to be controllable, and less disruptive to the data center to retrofit into brownfield environments. Up to a point, it works well!
At some point, though, cool plate solutions have reached an existential challenge of heat dissipation. Customers can experience leaks or thermal escapes with highly variable AI performance as system density scales. For these customers, immersion cooling (full immersion in dielectric fluid) offers an alternative. Immersion handles higher power densities with lower energy overhead, but it requires much more system certification to deploy safely.
At Intel, we see the coming of the immersion era, at least for high performance compute clusters. That’s why we’re helping to future proof infrastructure investment by certifying Xeon platforms for immersion, ensuring that CPUs behave reliably in immersive environments. This enables higher rack densities with confidence in stability and availability.
Moving into the Chill
So how should you approach the liquid alternatives? This has a lot to do with the density targets you’ve got on your infrastructure roadmap, and at what point you’ll hit a requirement for immersion. The time is now to evaluate cold plate solutions for immediate requirements and begin talking to vendors about immersion support. If you’re considering greenfield buildout, a transition to immersion sooner for your densest racks may make sense. In brownfield environments, take advantage of cold plate alternatives and their easier integration for the time being. Most importantly, strategically plan infrastructure within a long-term horizon to prioritize an efficient path through liquid cooling adoption with the right compute infrastructure support at each point in the migration path.
I recently visited a customer whose AI racks were reaching 750–800W per slot. Their data center layout couldn’t push more airflow so they were in hot pursuit, no pun intended, of cold plate cooling alternatives. But as they forecasted system power forward, they saw a near term horizon where cold plate technology may not provide enough thermal mitigation to address their dense infrastructure demands. They faced the question of migration to cold plate now knowing that another technology migration may be required in the future, or take the plunge into immersion cooling now.
This customer is not alone. We have reached the choke point of air cooling within highly dense data center infrastructure, and more deployments are reaching for liquid cooling solutions. Today, that liquid cooling alternative is likely a cold plate solution, delivering the right mix of cooling efficiency and required thermal control. And while this transition is playing out in data centers today, many are asking how long cold plate solutions will keep pace with data center requirements. After all, today’s racks are climbing past 1 megawatt with data center facilities scaling past 1 gigawatt representing unprecedented heat to mitigate. This leads to the question of how long cold plate’s day in the sun will last before immersion cooling becomes a required alternative.
But what is cold plate? Cold plate solutions offer controlled liquid to chip and handle thermal densities significantly better than air cooling alternatives. Many HPC and AI boxes today already support cold plate solutions. It’s relatively mature, perceived to be controllable, and less disruptive to the data center to retrofit into brownfield environments. Up to a point, it works well!
At some point, though, cool plate solutions have reached an existential challenge of heat dissipation. Customers can experience leaks or thermal escapes with highly variable AI performance as system density scales. For these customers, immersion cooling (full immersion in dielectric fluid) offers an alternative. Immersion handles higher power densities with lower energy overhead, but it requires much more system certification to deploy safely.
At Intel, we see the coming of the immersion era, at least for high performance compute clusters. That’s why we’re helping to future proof infrastructure investment by certifying Xeon platforms for immersion, ensuring that CPUs behave reliably in immersive environments. This enables higher rack densities with confidence in stability and availability.
Moving into the Chill
So how should you approach the liquid alternatives? This has a lot to do with the density targets you’ve got on your infrastructure roadmap, and at what point you’ll hit a requirement for immersion. The time is now to evaluate cold plate solutions for immediate requirements and begin talking to vendors about immersion support. If you’re considering greenfield buildout, a transition to immersion sooner for your densest racks may make sense. In brownfield environments, take advantage of cold plate alternatives and their easier integration for the time being. Most importantly, strategically plan infrastructure within a long-term horizon to prioritize an efficient path through liquid cooling adoption with the right compute infrastructure support at each point in the migration path.
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