Demand For Liquid-To-Chip Cooling Is Hot. Learn More At Bisnow's National DICE Event In Dallas On Oct. 7

While artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to drive data center demand, they also generate significant heat in high-performance servers.

To keep their systems cool, many data centers are adopting direct-to-chip liquid cooling. This technology circulates a liquid coolant directly over the server chips to efficiently absorb the heat, supporting reliable performance and optimized operational costs.

Ecolab, a global leader in water, hygiene and infection prevention solutions, has focused on cooling management for more than two decades. 

“While liquid cooling isn't brand new, the scale that we need to do it at in these large projects is unprecedented because of the demand for AI,” said Eric Kangas, senior engineered solutions manager at Nalco Water, an Ecolab company.

Kangas will speak about optimizing direct-to-chip cooling at Bisnow’s National DICE Event on Oct. 7 in Dallas. Register here. 

Bisnow spoke to Kangas about data center design trends he is seeing in Dallas, why data center operators should optimize direct-to-chip liquid cooling and how Ecolab is helping innovate in this sector. 

Bisnow: What data center design trends are you seeing in the Dallas area?

Kangas: Projects are getting bigger, and the scale is driven primarily by the demands from artificial intelligence. The adoption of AI in everyday business is creating this continued growth.

I'm also seeing data center locations getting pushed outside of the traditional metro areas, and that really is about owner-operators trying to find the balance between the available real estate, power and resources. 

The last trend I'm seeing is sustainability prioritization across the entire industry. We see new campus designs that are focusing more on the environmental and local community impact. Owners/operators are focusing on sustainability and driving change upfront in their designs to not only have a high-performing, AI-driven data center but also to become a good corporate citizen.

Bisnow: What will some of the hot takes be at the event? 

Kangas: While power availability and power demand have dominated the conference agendas, the hot topic this time will be liquid cooling. 

You’ve got the pace of change, aggressive growth and lack of standards, and that's creating what I've been calling a fear of fluids. You've got a lot of people in the industry who have spent their whole career trying to keep liquids out of the data center, and now we have these new designs that are being launched with liquids in the data center. We have to learn how to manage them properly.

To help address this, Ecolab will be talking about coolant health management and how owners and operators need to consider coolant as an asset that needs proper care. 

Bisnow: What should data center operators do to optimize direct-to-chip cooling, especially from a design perspective?

Kangas: We emphasize that they have to design clean, which is engineering the system to help reduce contamination that would compromise the long-term reliability of the operations.

From Day 1, you need to plan for monitoring of these systems because these are not a set-it-and-forget-it scenario. You not only want to monitor the design in the sensors and ports, but you also want to be ready with a design that’s serviceable and can handle a bad day. 

What happens if you need to drain the glycol from a system? Did you design the proper port to do that in the time frame you need? When operators and designers keep those things in mind in the design phase and not just think about the cooling efficiency, they're going to save significant cost and potential downtime headaches later on. 

Bisnow: How can startups impact the success of direct-to-chip cooling, and what should data center operators be focused on at that stage?

Kangas: My advice would be to take your time in this phase because it’s not just about the right design but making sure that the system properly flushes and cleans. Imagine a brand-new data center site where stuff gets delivered early and stuff may lie around for months. Depending on how it was delivered and preserved, it could get dirt and microbial contamination in the system. 

We recommend that you flush and clean these materials before hooking them up to multimillion-dollar pieces of equipment. From there, you test, verify and monitor the equipment from Day 1 by looking at your fluid and its pH balance to determine the health of the fluid. If you see a problem six months later, you may have already missed your window of opportunity to respond. 

At Ecolab, we want to help our clients avoid a problem by having the information we need to make a course correction before there’s an issue. 

Bisnow: What is Ecolab doing to help innovate direct-to-chip cooling solutions in today’s data centers?

Kangas: Our goal is to ultimately address liquid cooling reliability and sustainability. We’ve got more than a century in industrial water management, and we're leveraging that experience to adapt to these new systems.

While direct-to-chip liquid cooling is now being used on a bigger scale, we’ve already used it for many years. We’re leveraging our fluid expertise and providing treatment protocols and insights. This helps extend the life of the coolant, reducing corrosion and minimizing the contamination that might otherwise decrease the performance in a system. 

We've made a significant investment in real-time monitoring with our 3D Trasar technology for direct-to-chip liquid cooling, which makes the task of coolant health monitoring easier for the operator. 

We’ve also partnered with industry groups like the Open Compute Project, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, and iMasons to innovate alongside them. Collaboration is crucial because we’re still in the pioneering moments of AI computing, so we need to come together to create standards to benefit us all. 

Click here for more about the Oct. 7 Bisnow event. 

This article was produced in collaboration between Ecolab and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.