Hardware cooling Liquid cooling of AI computers is booming in Asia

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Air cooling is not particularly efficient in large data centers and is also a major cost factor in the operation of supercomputers and artificial intelligence. In China, there is already a strong emphasis on liquid cooling, which is more economical and energy-efficient.

This year, Asia's servers are going underwater, at least figuratively. A remarkable boom phase has begun for the liquid cooling of data centers, ever since artificial intelligence has been heating up the computers. The new demand is a great opportunity for young companies with innovative solutions like Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC) from Singapore.

The young company with the abbreviated brand name SMC has developed a solution for immersion cooling that, according to its own statements, can reduce energy consumption in data centers by 50 percent. This appeals to many large customers, as not only have electricity bills for data centers skyrocketed since the popularization of generative AI, but there is also political pressure to find sustainable, energy-saving cooling solutions. After all, a lot of electricity is first consumed by the computers themselves and then again for cooling these computers.

SMC produces so-called "Hypercubes," in which the GPUs from Nvidia or other manufacturers are liquid-cooled, significantly reducing the costs of the constantly running air conditioning systems in data centers. At the same time, the cubes with their container design help to use data centers more effectively because they can be easily installed in their still unused spaces.

In cooperation with Nvidia

Its technology enables "High Density Hosting" for GPUs like the new Grace Blackwell from Nvidia, SMC CEO Tim Rosenfield recently said in an interview with the American business channel CNBC. The company has already secured Nvidia as a partner and provides its computing infrastructure to customers of the consulting agency Deloitte, among others. Investors in SMC include "ST Telemedia Global Data Centres," one of the largest data center operators in Asia. Its financial supporters include the state investment fund Temasek in Singapore.

Railroad tie design by Inspur

The data center market in Asia is growing particularly rapidly, not least because the technology is supported by the Chinese government. Although chip cooling is not exactly high tech, this market has not been spared from the US-China trade war. Last year, China's largest server manufacturer, Inspur, was placed on Washington's notorious "Entity List." Since then, companies in the USA need a special license to buy products from Inspur.

The growth of the company was not slowed down by this, even though it now takes place more domestically and in Asia than before. The semiconductors from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei or Biren Technology are real power guzzlers, and the data centers where they operate at high temperatures are increasingly being cooled with liquid.

At the end of last month, Inspur introduced a newly developed cooling technology that it calls "Railroad Tie Design." In these new server types, the memory modules alternate with cooling plates ("Cold Plates"), which allow for better dissipation of heat from the particularly warm "hotspots" of the servers. For densely packed DRAM memory units, this solution is much better than any air cooling and is also significantly more effective than sandwich cooling or other liquid solutions, Inspur claims. It has recently expanded its production lines to be able to produce up to 300,000 liquid-cooled servers annually.

Government support—also for sustainability

The Chinese government supports the modernization of existing data centers with a nationwide development plan called the "Action Plan to Promote Large-Scale Equipment Updates and Trade-in of Old Consumer Goods." Since then—and since Washington began its trade war—the sales of liquid-cooled servers in the People's Republic have grown particularly rapidly.

Regardless of the competition between individual companies or nations, these liquid cooling solutions are really good news for all engineers working on more sustainable, "greener" data centers to support the AI boom. In the People's Republic of China alone, data centers consumed 266.8 billion kilowatt-hours of energy last year. This was almost twice as much as the city of Beijing, with its approximately 20 million residents, consumed—trend rapidly increasing. (sb)