Feature: Thermal management
Average rack power density has
Compact chemically-etched heat exchangers are emerging as an attractive option for next-generation liquid cooling architectures
could become a defining factor in how quickly next-generation liquid cooling infrastructure can be deployed.
AI infrastructure is changing thermal management A recent Goldman Sachs report called ‘Tracking Trillions: Te Assumptions Shaping the Scale of the AI Build-Out’ notes that: “Today, developers are realising that data centres designed less than two years ago (i.e., “transitional AI data centres”) may be insufficiently provisioned for the next generation
of cutting-edge AI chips, given their significant power and cooling demands.” Te growth of AI is fundamentally
changing the thermal requirements of data centres. Traditional computing workloads could largely be managed through improvements in airflow management, cooling efficiency and facility design. However, the vast and fast increase in accelerator-based computing has introduced a new challenge: removing significantly higher concentrations of heat from increasingly compact hardware.
increased substantially over recent years, but the change is particularly pronounced in AI-focused deployments. For example, AI workloads are increasing data centre rack density by five times, pushing rack densities to 30, 50 and, in many cases, over 100kW per rack, according to
DataCenters.com. Liquid cooling addresses this challenge
by bringing coolant closer to the source of heat generation. Instead of relying solely on air movement through a server enclosure, liquid cooling systems transfer heat away from high-performance processors through dedicated cooling loops, before rejecting that heat elsewhere in the facility. Tis transition creates demand across
an entire thermal management supply chain, from cold plates mounted directly onto processors through to coolant distribution units (CDUs), pumps and heat exchangers. While much of the industry attention focuses on GPUs and computing
Plate heat exchanger
www.electronicsworld.co.uk September 2026 37
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