IPC International Community magazine an association member publication
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54 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2026 We learned in some of the technical sessions here that modern liquid-cooling solutions use less water and power than air cooling. That being the case, why didn't the industry just go to liquid cooling first? Remember, these data centers at the time weren't built for the optimum data center design. They were built around the chip technology they were supporting. So, the data center design was very agnostic to the IT itself. At that time, air cooling was a logical solution. But now, with the incredible amount of heat that modern AI data servers gen- erate, we must take a different approach to both rack and data center design. Is this a trend that continues to ramp with each new chip design? Yes, the generational shift between chipsets is im- mense. If you are deploying NVIDIA and deciding whether to deploy a GB200 NVL72 or a GB300 NVL72 rack system, each choice shifts how you need to distribute power and cooling. Today, liquid cooling has become a necessity. Yet just five years ago, we were still looking at liquid cooling from a sustainability angle. We knew it would happen at some point, but weren't sure when. Liquid cooling existed before AI, particularly in parts of Asia where climate and efficiency concerns made it attractive. However, the public launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 was an inflection point, accel- erating AI adoption dramatically and turning liquid cooling from an efficiency strategy into an opera- tional necessity. Is there more upfront OEM involvement in data center and infrastructure design than there had been previously? Yes, these changes are being driven by the OEMs, which have significantly affected the white-space design of servers. These server racks are being built plug-and-play ready for liquid cooling. ("White space" refers to the area inside a data center that is available for IT equipment: servers, storage, net- working gear, and racks.) We used to have thousands of server vendors. At one point, the guiding intelligence was that only 25% of servers would ever be liquid-cooled. Now, new server designs are released only with liquid cooling built in. That's what has driven the industry's shift toward liquid cooling. This also changes the supply chain side. Today, only a few qualified organizations can build the right kind of server rack and data center facilities. OEMs like NVIDIA are working with that market, helping to bring up more qualified vendors. Retrofitting Existing Data Centers As these new data centers emerge, what will hap- pen to all the old server farms? Will they always have utility as air-cooling facilities, be retrofitted for liquid cooling, or go defunct and become idle? The older server facilities were generally built for enterprise computing, not the newer cloud-based applications that require more power and generate more heat. It's difficult to retrofit such facilities, but not impossible. On the Motivair tour, you saw some heat-dissipa- tion units at the end of the production line that were being developed into liquid-to-air coolant distribu- tion units (CDUs). Those are often seen in brown- field or existing air-cooled data centers that don't have facility water going into their white space. Theoretically, then, at least some of those older data centers could still be useful. Yes, where you could deploy liquid cooling into those environments, modernization will be a big part of what happens. The access to power that those sites already have is primary for any data cen- ter location. You can leverage some of the electrical infrastructure even if you must rebuild into a more modern facility. You may need to modernize some of the cooling infrastructure and look more at the physical build. What's the slab density? If it's multi-story, what weight can it manage? The weight that must be supported and the amount of steel and concrete infrastructure involved are different and much more substantial than what you would have for an existing enterprise compute data center. We are seeing the larger companies do this at some of their older cloud computing sites. SPECIAL SECTION ▼