With the rapid development of science and technology, the problem of energy consumption and heat dissipation in data centers has become increasingly prominent. Traditional air-cooled servers have been unable to cope with the challenges of high-density computing and large-scale data processing. Compared with the traditional air cooling system, the emerging liquid cooling system can greatly reduce energy consumption and heat dissipation problems. In the context of the global implementation of mandatory carbon reduction policies for data centers, liquid-cooled servers have emerged and ushered in explosive growth.

Just recently, according to reporters learned that at the Artificial Intelligence Computing conference, International Data Corporation IDC and Inspur Information jointly released the "2023-2024 Artificial intelligence computing power Development Evaluation Report", IDC expects that 2022-2027, the liquid cooling server market compound annual growth rate will reach 54.7%, The market size will reach $9.5 billion in 2027.

The liquid cooling system gradually replaces the air-cooled system has become a foregone conclusion, and the main reason is the problem of the explosion of computing power. What is the reason for the explosion of computing power? Please continue to watch!

The reason for the explosion of computing power

The root cause of the outbreak of computing power is the imbalance between supply and demand, and the supply side is mainly restricted by the development limit of CPU, flow cost, carbon emissions and other factors, and the marginal cost performance ratio of centralized computing power is weakening. The total scale of China's computing power now reaches 1.97 trillion trillion floating point operations per second, ranking second in the world! The average annual growth rate of computing power in the past 5 years is nearly 30%!

And 2023 is a year of explosive growth of China's computing industry. This year, policies at all levels frequently led the way for the high-quality development of computing power, accelerated the quality of computing infrastructure construction and the layout of intelligent computing power, and the innovative application of computing power "spurt", accelerated the deep integration of data and real, the scale of computing power industry continued to grow, and became a new engine of economic growth, so that computing power was unbalanced and explosive growth.

Liquid cooling technology from cold to hot

With the outbreak of computing power, the power consumption of chips equipped with computing power is increasing, and the heat dissipation problem has become one of the unavoidable problems in the intelligent computing industry. Industry insiders point out that for every 10 degrees of increase in chip temperature, the failure rate will double and the life will be halved. On the other hand, when the typical power of the chip exceeds 300W and the power consumption per square centimeter exceeds 90W, it has reached the upper limit of the air-cooled system, and the power consumption of the mainstream chip products in the industry has long exceeded this threshold.

Liquid cooling is not a new technology, as early as the 1960s to the 1990s, liquid cooling was also used in data centers. However, in the era of Moore's Law at that time, the chip power consumption was constantly reduced, and the expensive liquid cooling technology was gradually put on the shelf.

And now the chip power is getting higher and higher, the power density of a single cabinet is getting larger and larger, and the liquid cooling technology is rapidly turning red, and gradually becoming the mainstream solution of green data centers. The liquid cooling server is divided into three types: cold plate, immersion and spray, among which, the cold plate technology is more mature and has achieved large-scale commercial use. Compared with the cold plate, the submerged type has obvious advantages in heat dissipation efficiency, single cabinet power and space utilization rate, and is the best solution for liquid cooling, but the construction cost and use cost are high, and further technical breakthroughs are yet to be made.

Giants have entered the liquid cooling market

Industry insiders pointed out that 2022 is the first year of data center liquid cooling. In 2023, the promotion and popularization of liquid cooling programs are rapidly deepening, and the market penetration rate is expected to reach 20-30%.

At the Fully Connected Conference in 2022, Huawei officially released the fully liquid-cooled "Tiancheng" diversity computing platform. A year later, Huawei Centeng World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) exhibited the Atlas 900 computing cluster integrated with "Tiancheng" liquid cooling computing platform, supporting the scale of 10,000 cardstock.

In addition to Huawei, Lenovo upgraded the "Poseidon" warm water cooling system, which can realize the server full water cooling without fan design; Sugon Shuchuang, a subsidiary of Sugon, released the "cold balance" strategy and launched full-stack liquid cooled data center technology and one-stop service for the whole life cycle. H3c also combines servers, core routers, and access switches to launch full-stack liquid cooling solutions. Giants compete to enter the game, the industry is prosperous, and data centers are moving toward the era of liquid cooling. IDC data show that in terms of market pattern, wave information, Ningchang, and super fusion are three strong liquid cooled servers, accounting for about 70% of the market share, and liquid cooling instead of air cooling has become a major trend in the industry.

Lori's research and development of liquid cooling servers

The cold plate liquid cooling server developed by Lori Company, in the context of "digital economy" and "dual carbon", constantly improve the chip heat flux and strict equipment energy consumption design, which requires to become the two major driving forces for the continuous evolution of server heat dissipation and data center cooling technology. And the cold plate liquid cooling server developed by Lori company has the advantages of low energy consumption, high heat dissipation, low noise, low TCO, and is a large server deployed in the cabinet, and is equipped with leakage detection function, which can make the data will not occur irreversible situation.

In the future, Lori will also deepen the research and design of liquid cooling technology, continue to innovate in the fields of direct cooling and indirect cooling, and expand a broader space for the green development of China's information industry.

Sum up

With the improvement of environmental awareness and the increasingly serious problem of data center energy consumption, the prospect of liquid-cooled servers is very broad. In the future, with the advancement of technology and the reduction of costs, liquid cooled servers are expected to become the mainstream heat dissipation technology in data centers.