- Dell’Oro has once again upped its liquid cooling forecast
- Nvidia’s adoption of direct liquid cooling has helped speed things along
- Direct liquid cooling will lead the adoption curve, while two-phase immersion faces the biggest uphill battle
Liquid cooling vendors rejoice! A new forecast from Dell’Oro Group now calls for $15 billion in cumulative revenue by 2028, up from a previous estimate of $10 billion.
What changed? Well, artificial intelligence (AI) demand has something to do with it, as does Nvidia’s decision to adopt direct liquid cooling for its high-performance systems.
Back in February, Dell’Oro predicted the overall data center thermal management market would hit $12 billion by 2028, with liquid cooling accounting for $3.5 billion of that. It now expects the overall market to be worth $13 billion by 2028, with liquid cooling accounting for roughly a third of that total – or roughly $4.29 billion.
“This was the result of increasing expectations for deployments of high-end accelerators to support AI workloads and growing confidence in those processors being liquid-cooled,” Dell’Oro Research Director Lucas Beran told Fierce.
All told, over the five-year period from 2024 to 2028, cumulative liquid cooling revenues are expected to hit $15 billion.
So, which of the many forms of liquid cooling will dominate? Beran said it’ll be single-phase direct liquid cooling by a mile. Single phase just means the liquid used will remain a liquid rather than becoming a gas and being recondensed as in two-phase systems. And direct cooling means the liquid is piped directly to the hottest parts of the processor via a cold plate-style setup.
Check out this handy chart based on market figures Dell’Oro shared with Fierce.
That said, Beran noted air cooling isn’t going anywhere.
“I don’t think about liquid cooling as cannibalizing growth from another thermal management segment, such as air cooling, but rather enabling growth in a new segment of the market that air cooling isn’t well-positioned support,” he explained. “Air cooling is certainly not going away, but I am forecasting growth to slow during the forecast period (2024 – 2028) to a mid-to-high single-digit rate.”
And what about the potential for new, disruptive technologies – ahem, reversible computing, anyone? – to shake up the forecast trajectory? Not likely, Beran said.
“This is a very interesting concept, and I’m certainly not an expert here, but I’m highly skeptical at this time,” he said. Why? Well, today, innovative devices which can turn heat from servers into energy are “about the size of a roll of paper towels and weigh 100 points.” They can also only manage 20-30kW each, so several would be needed for a single Nvidia rack, he noted.
While these aren’t the same thing as reversible computing chips, “I share this to demonstrate that a significant amount of innovation is required before a similar type of technology can be scaled to operate at the individual processor level,” Beran concluded.