Liquid cooling market set to go mainstream

“After tracking the Data Center Liquid Cooling market for five years, it’s finally transitioning from a niche technology deployed in specific segments of the market to mainstream applicability,” said Lucas Beran, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Historically, liquid cooling vendors touted increased efficiency and sustainability as factors behind the technology’s adoption. While those benefits remain true, it’s proved to be the increased thermal management performance capabilities, meeting the particularly demanding thermal requirements of high-end processors and accelerated servers, that is the current driving force behind its adoption.

“As this adoption occurs, it’s single-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling (DLC) deployments that are scaling first. This is the result of long-standing adoption in the high-performance computing (HPC) industry that has helped establish a more mature vendor ecosystem and end-user know-how to deploy and service the technology. Additionally, NVIDIA has specified single-phase DLC as the cooling technology to support its upcoming GB200 compute nodes. Yet, other forms of liquid cooling are emerging in the rapidly growing liquid cooling market. Both single-phase immersion and two-phase DLC are undergoing testing, validation, and proof of concept work, which is materializing in growing pipelines for those vendors. Two-phase immersion, on the other hand, is facing an uphill battle towards adoption, as it remains particularly challenged by the regulatory environment surrounding PFAS fluid use,” continued Beran.

Additional highlights from the Data Center Liquid Cooling Advanced Research Report:

CoolIT Systems, Boyd, and Motivair were the top three vendors in Data Center Liquid Cooling revenues in 2023.

Single-phase DLC is the leading data center liquid cooling technology. This is expected to continue throughout the forecast period, however, two-phase DLC and single-phase immersion revenues are also forecast to materially grow during the forecast period.

The Enterprise customer segment, including HPC, was the leading customer segment of Data Center Liquid Cooling in 2023. However, the service provider customer segment, which includes the Top 10 Cloud, Rest-of-Cloud, Colocation, and Telco, is forecast to significantly outpace the growth of enterprises during the forecast period.

Air-assisted liquid cooling and liquid-to-liquid heat exchange types are both forecast to grow at significant double-digit rates during the forecast period. By 2028, they are forecast to account for more than a third of the overall data center thermal management market.