Is Liquid Cooling Adoption By Data Centers Becoming A Zero-Sum Game?
Data Center Knowledge, Thursday, August 24,2023
As data centers' demand for liquid cooling systems continues to increase, strangely, so has demand for high-efficiency air cooling. It seems AI workloads may be bifurcating facility designs.
It was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal market update for data center servers, produced earlier this month by Omdia: While the research arm of Informa Tech downgraded its worldwide server shipment forecast for 2023 a second time this year, to an 11% year-over-year decline, it has seen unprecedented growth in liquid cooling deployments.
"Preliminary data center cooling equipment data points indicate a sharp increase in liquid cooling deployments," reported Omdia's Cloud and Data Center Research Practice Director Vlad Galabov at the time of the report's release, citing figures supplied by thermal management equipment vendors. Some vendors, who had already reported thermal equipment sales increasing as much as 20x (that's not a typo) in the second half of last year, saw continued increases of more than 50% in the first half of 2023.