Immersion Datacenter Cooling: Unparalleled Cooling Efficiency

In the ever-expanding digital landscape, data centers are the backbone of modern businesses, powering everything from cloud services to artificial intelligence applications. As datacenter infrastructure continues to evolve, the quest for efficient cooling solutions has become paramount. Among the emerging technologies, immersion datacenter cooling stands out as a game-changer. With its unparalleled cooling efficiency, immersion cooling is redefining the boundaries of datacenter performance, energy consumption, and operational costs.

This post will cover the innovative cooling method offers numerous advantages over traditional cooling techniques, and presents a compelling case for its adoption in your datacenter strategy, whether you are looking from the perspective of an datacenter investor, operator or customer.

N.B. Whilst there are two main types of immersion cooling, single-phase and two-phase, the pros and cons of each have been discussed at length, and are linked at the bottom of the post.

By submerging servers in a dielectric fluid, we can achieve a heat dissipation rate that is 1000 times more efficient than air, leading to revolutionary improvements.

Higher Efficiency

Traditional data centers typically require an additional 50% of power just to cool the IT infrastructure. This results in a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.5, a measure of how efficiently a computer data center uses energy. In contrast, the best air-cooled facilities, like those owned by Google, achieve an optimized PUE of around 1.1.

However, most immersion-cooled systems are designed to operate with a PUE between 1.03 and 1.05, significantly outperforming even the best air-cooled facilities. They can also function without water, which presents further environmental benefits, but that leads to a discussion about Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), a measure of how efficiently water is used in a data center, and that's a topic for another time.

Less Waste, Higher Density, Lower Operational Costs

Conventional server racks require complex cooling solutions, significantly increasing costs and footprint of a data center. Immersion cooling significantly simplifies the cooling infrastructure and reduces the complexity of managing the data center's plant and mechanical needs.

In fact, an immersion cooled facility uses 10% of the land an air cooled facility occupies AND facilitates a 10-15x density improvement per rack equivalent.

It’s kind of like the difference between a toy-car EV Porsche, and a bus.

Why is Higher Density important? Take Supermicro’s latest HGX H100 system;

• 8x NVIDIA H100 GPUs (up to 700W each)
• 2x AMD EPYC CPU’s (up to 400W each)
• 6x 3000W PSU’s in an 8U form factor

This is 1125W per U - try air-cooling a rack full of those! With immersion, you’d have 3x the thermal headroom

More Reliable

Immersion cooling designs have fewer moving parts because they eliminate or deactivate all fans before submerging the servers. This results in less noise, making them a quieter solution for data centers.

A study conducted by Green Revolution Cooling (GRC) suggests that removing these now redundant fans can decrease a server's energy consumption by 10-15%. Additionally, the server runs more reliably due to less mechanical failure and, almost silently!

Immersion cooling comes with an often overlooked benefit: the fluid introduces a form of thermal inertia to the system.

In a traditional air-cooled setup, a chip will start from room temperature. It then rapidly heats up upon power-up, causing the fan to activate and eventually reach maximum speed when the system is in use or under stress.

However, the scenario is different with fluid immersion cooling. Because the fluid's baseline temperature is higher than that of air, the environment is more controlled. This results in temperature fluctuations occurring within a narrower range, which has been shown to reduce the likelihood of component failures.

Why does [x] care?

An Investor - modern data centers are under social pressure to reduce their carbon emissions, and access to large amounts of power is getting harder to secure. A moratorium in Singapore is requiring data centers to have a PUE of <1.3 for example, and in Ireland, up to 17% of the country’s power is used for data centers. As the AI Gold Rush is upon us, there’s only one way to operate these infrastructures at scale, and it doesn’t involve fans.

An Operator - Essentially, immersion cooling is a technology shift and as chip TDP’s are continuing to double every generation, operators should be designing, planning and implementing systems NOW. The added benefit is that future proofing your assets, also facilitates higher margins as high-valued services can be sold, operational costs drop, and also, ESG compliance becomes much easier to implement.

A Customer - As high-powered HPC services like AI and LLM’s are in high-demand, immersion cooling enables operators the ability to supply these services, and efficiently. This should lead to lower costs for services, or at least less exposure to power price fluctuations.

Summary

The article highlights the relevance of immersion cooling for different stakeholders. Investors are driven by the need for data centers to reduce carbon emissions and secure access to power, while operators should embrace this technology shift to future-proof their assets and capitalize on higher margins, service offerings, and ESG compliance. Customers benefit from lower costs and increased efficiency for high-powered services like AI and HPC, with reduced exposure to power price fluctuations.

Overall, immersion datacenter cooling offers compelling advantages over traditional cooling techniques, making it an attractive option for datacenter strategies in terms of performance, energy efficiency, and operational costs.

Sources;

Efficiency – Data Centers – Google

Immersion cooling - Wikipedia

Asperitas Immersed Computing? – Performance boosting cloud & compute immersion cooling solutions.

Two-Phase Liquid Immersion Cooling for servers | Solution - GIGABYTE Global

Temperature rise comparison between the uncontrolled and the liquid... | Download Scientific Diagram (researchgate.net)

grc-liquid-immersion-cooling-reduces-power-use-and-drives-sustainability.pdf (grcooling.com)

Slide 1 (3m.com)

SmartPod | Immersion Cooling Made Practical | Immersion Cooling (submer.com)

Supermicro Launches Industry's First NVIDIA HGX H100 8 and 4-GPU H100 Servers with Liquid Cooling -- Reduces Data Center Power Costs by Up to 40% | Supermicro