AI Vocabulary · 02 AI Infrastructure

What is Liquid Cooling?

Cooling chips with a liquid that flows through cold plates on the chip or around the whole server, needed for dense AI racks.

Intermediate

All the electricity a chip uses becomes heat. Air can carry away the heat of an ordinary server rack, which averages under 10 kW. A rack full of GPUs for AI can need more than 130 kW, too much for fans alone. Liquid cooling takes over: in direct-to-chip cooling, cold plates sit on the AI chips and a coolant carries the heat away in a closed loop. In immersion cooling, whole servers sit in a non-conductive fluid.

Liquid cooling inside the rack says nothing yet about water use. Whether a data centre consumes water depends on how it releases the heat outside: cooling towers evaporate water, dry coolers use more electricity. Because liquid-cooled racks can run warmer, they allow more free cooling with outside air, which can save both energy and water, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Why it matters for you

Liquid cooling decides where the newest AI systems can run at all. Older data centres without it cannot host the densest racks, which shapes capacity, prices and the efficiency of the services you buy.

Own it

When a provider promotes liquid cooling, ask how the site releases its heat and what its WUE and PUE are. Those two figures show the real effect on water and electricity.

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