- Valvoline's brand is closely associated with cars but it's making a name for itself in the data center liquid cooling space
- The company's head of R&D shared with Fierce what characteristics make for a great coolant
- New Dell'Oro numbers show the market continues to see explosive growth.
If you’ve listened to enough tech keynotes, you may have heard AI and high performance compute chips systems compared to Formula 1 racecars. It’s little surprise then, to discover that they share one surprising trait: both are liquid cooled.
Incidentally, that’s how Fierce ended up speaking with George Zhang, VP of R&D at Valvoline Global. Yes, that Valvoline, the brand that provides automotive lubricants and has oil change service stations across the U.S.
Valvoline has been producing automotive coolants for several decades, and, according to Zhang, the chemistry in the PG-25 coolant it provides for direct-to-chip liquid cooling is “quite similar to the chemistry we use in automotive coolants.” PG stands for propylene glycol and 25 represents the proportion of that chemical in a mixture with water – 25%.
When it comes to server coolants, there are a few key properties the liquid needs to have. First, Zhang said, the liquid needs to have certain additives that prevent corrosion of the system it’s running through and foaming, which could gum up the works. Additionally, for immersion liquid coolants, it is key to ensure the liquid is dielectric, inert and has no chemical reaction with the server components it is touching.
Zhang said while Valvoline believes it has a great coolant product on the market today, it’s always looking for new additives that can provide improvements across five key performance vectors: physical, thermal, chemical, rheological and electrical.
Surprise, surprise
Interestingly, Zhang said liquid cooling seems to do more than provide better thermal management for increasingly hot AI chips.
“We are also going to be able to provide better noise reduction and dust suppression,” he said. How? Well, the fans employed by traditional air cooling systems are loud and pick up and circulate a lot of dust in the environment. Take those out of the equation and voila.”
“At the beginning we never thought about it, but when we went about implementing the liquid cooling, we’ve seen a dramatic improvement in those aspects too,” he said.
On the horizon
In terms of which kind of liquid cooling Zhang expects to take off, he pointed to direct-to-chip as the leading contender for the next 5-10 years. After that, though, he said the industry could spring for hybrid direct-immersion or full blown immersion systems.
According to Dell’Oro Group, liquid cooling continues to proliferate at a startling pace. The analyst firm recently bumped up its data center physical infrastructure forecast (which includes liquid cooling kit) – AGAIN – to a cumulative $61 billion by 2029. That’s up from its previous forecast of $50 billion by 2028.
“Actual results through 2024 exceeded our predictions, second, shipments of accelerated computing (and high-end GPUs), designed to handle AI workloads exceeded our prior forecast,” Tam Dell’Oro, Founder of Dell’Oro Group, said in a statement. She added it has also “learned that demand—which remains robust—is spreading from Tier 1 to Tier 2 Cloud Service Providers.”
That’s right, folks, liquid cooling is HOT.