Intel pushes for liquid immersion cooling in their datacenter plans

Intel recently announces that the company is collaborating with Green Revolution Cooling to develop newer liquid immersion techniques for upcoming edge deployments and data processing centers. GRC is a developer that focuses on cooling solutions based on immersive liquid cooling. This is Intel's second collaboration with an immersion liquid cooling company; the company's first was with Submer in August 2021.

Intel collaborates with a second liquid immersion cooling company for future cooling techniques in use with upcoming data centers

With the introduction of Intel Xeon processors' increased thermal design power, high-level workloads have jumped from 165W per socket to 270W over the last five years. Artificial intelligence produces upwards of 700W of thermal design power levels. This increased level of power has forced Intel to research further cooling technology to keep more stable heat levels. Enter Green Revolution Cooling's liquid immersion solutions, offering cooling performance as high as 200kW. The levels produced by Green Revolution Cooling are comparable to 42 1U machines that utilize premium computer processors and even higher-producing accelerators. Additionally, utilizing liquid immersion cooling minimizes environmental impact, offering to reuse the generated heat to convert it into electricity or other eco-friendly options.

Through this collaboration, we are able to provide customers with custom solutions to meet their computing and cooling needs to help ensure that data centers operate in a more environmentally sensitive way. Our collaboration with GRC aligns with Intel’s goal of supporting cutting edge technologies that provide increased efficiency and density for data center and edge deployments.

— Mohan Kumar, Senior Fellow, Intel

Intel plans to collaborate with Green Revolution Cooling to offer both companies the ability to combine their consumer base by creating customized and validated liquid immersed cooling solutions for workplace rack systems that are powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors. This will also guarantee any new fluids appearing in the marketplace are compatible, efficient, and safe, along with educating the current markets on the environmental benefits of liquid immersion cooling.

The collaborations between Intel and both cooling developers will allow for essential customers to utilize the liquid immersion technology, as well as create new solutions for centers processing high amounts of data. Intel will secure appropriate hardware for mass production in the current supply chain for data centers that are planned to capitalize on Intel's Xeon processors and Xe-HPC compute accelerators in the future.