Based on publicly available product road maps from major chip manufacturers, by 2026, air-cooled systems will no longer be able to meet the cooling needs of most next-generation, high-performance computing chips. In other words, in less than two years, the most widely used method in the more than 5,300 data centers in the U.S. today will fall short in its ability to cool the components that support exponential growth in the world’s data processing and storage applications.
Thankfully, scientists and engineers anticipated the challenges data centers will soon be facing and innovated technology solutions with the capacity to meet elevated cooling requirements. Beyond simply allowing for effective cooling of next-generation computing chips, this technology comes with a host of other benefits, ranging from greater energy efficiency to a smaller physical footprint. However, before diving into the details about this new technology — known as two-phase immersion cooling (2-PIC) — it’s important to understand the background behind today’s need for improved cooling solutions.