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# Liquid cooling in the data centre
- URL: https://www.techstories.co/liquid-cooling-in-the-data-centre/
- Published: 2025-07-21T09:06:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-07-26T09:07:04.000Z
- Description: And the road ahead for liquid cooling.
- Author: Paul Mah
- Tags: Data Centres, AI

Last month, I gave a private briefing to some investors about liquid cooling in the data centre. What's the road ahead for this technology?

For those curious about how liquid cooling works, I've attached a small section of the deck showing systems used in data centres today.

Understanding a data centre isn't difficult, though it sure can get confusing. Here's what I talked about.

[Liquid Cooling PresentationLiquid Cooling Presentation.pdf1 MBdownload-circle](https://www.techstories.co/content/files/2025/07/Liquid-Cooling-Presentation.pdf "Download")

### Why liquid cooling, why now

Liquid cooling has been around for quite a while now. Why the sudden interest? One word: AI.

- Scaling laws suggested better AI with more GPUs.
- Justified ever-larger GPU deployments.
- No result. Then one day, AI worked.

The result?

Massive scale, powerful AI systems that must be cooled. And a liquid such as water can carry about 3,500 times more heat than the same volume of air. So liquid cooling it is.

### Types of liquid cooling

The 3 key types of liquid cooling are:

- Rear Door Cooler (RDC) - Chiller water to each rack.
- Direct to chip (DTC) - Chilled water to CPUs/GPUs.
- Immersion cooling - Immersion in a liquid (not water).

You can check out my photos of the various liquid cooling solutions in the attached slides.

### Key components

I highlighted some key components, and how they typically fit into a data centre.

- Cooling Tower.
- Chiller.
- CRAC.
- CDU:  
(a) Liquid to liquid CDUs (Typically).  
(b) Liquid to air CDUs.
- Manifold.

### Additional topics

I also talked about the following topics, though I capped it at just three of each due to time limitation.

(a) Myths and realities  
(b) Challenges for data centre operators

### What's next

Looking at data centres today, I do think two things will happen in the months and years ahead.

- AI data centres will diverge even further from those in traditional data centres. As noted at my fireside chat two weeks ago, this is already happening today with new, high-capacity systems designed for AI workloads.
- Inference hardware will start to increase. Some desktop and smartphone can already do some inferencing, but I will expect more inference-capable AI server chips to proliferate. Did you know: The China-only H20 is much stronger in AI inferencing than AI training?

Where do you see the data centre industry going?

**PS**: And yes, my presentations tend to be very graphical with few words.