Feature: Thermal management


Cold plate


The hidden manufacturing challenge


behind AI cooling By Ben Kitson, Head of Business Development, Precision Micro


and ensuring hot aisle containment was properly implemented. Today it means rethinking how heat is removed at the rack and chip level, as power densities increase and air cooling reaches its physical limits. Tis has brought liquid cooling, advanced cold plate design (Figure 1) and system-level thermal engineering into sharper focus. Beneath the rapid evolution of AI


A


cooling technology sits a less visible but equally important manufacturing


decade ago, thermal management in a data centre largely meant specifying the right computer room air conditioning units


challenge: producing the precision- engineered components that make advanced thermal management possible. Compact chemically-etched heat


exchangers are emerging as an attractive option for next-generation liquid cooling architectures, particularly where high thermal performance and compact size are required. Tey depend on chemically machined metal plates (Figure 2) to create the complex flow structures required for efficient heat transfer. For manufacturers supporting this


transition, the challenge is becoming more complex. It is not only designing cooling systems capable of handling higher thermal loads, but ensuring that the specialist manufacturing processes


36 September 2026 www.electronicsworld.co.uk


required to produce those systems can scale alongside demand. Precision chemical etching is an


important enabling manufacturing technology in heat exchanger production. However, the combination of process expertise, equipment investment and the required quality control means that only a small number of manufacturers have the capability to produce these components at meaningful volumes. As AI infrastructure investment


accelerates, attention is beginning to shiſt from the performance of individual cooling technologies to the manufacturing capacity behind them. Te ability to produce precision-etched plates consistently, repeatedly and at scale


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