“We're producing and consuming hundreds of thousands of cold plates a month. And by next year, that could climb to maybe close to a million cold plates a month. I mean, this is crazy. 2022, we might have been talking about 100,000 cold plates a year, right, in the whole industry.”
Catalyst with Shayle Kann · Climate & Energy · October 2026
Shedd is explaining the different ways of cooling data center chips with liquid. A cold plate is the finned copper block that sits on a chip and carries coolant across it. He says the industry has settled on the simplest version of this because it is the only one whose supply chain can keep up with demand.
Transcript
Ultimately, what we have to do is bring water to every device that needs to be cooled with liquid. So the reason I qualify that is there are different architectures for servers today. Some are like the eight-way DGX architectures. Today, those are still typically a hybrid cooled solution. So the GPUs and MV-Link and other devices are cooled with water, but storage might still be air-cooled. Network cards might still be air-cooled and so on. So I'm going to have some mix of airflow through the server as well as liquid. And in other cases, like the MVL72, it's 100% liquid-cooled. So I'm bringing water into the server and having to route it to every device, somehow touching every device greater than about a half a watt. So it's a really intense process once we decide that everything's going to be liquid-cooled. So imagine just, it's a plumbing problem. I've got two ports. In a supply and a return on the server, and I've got to route that liquid to every cold plate, to every piece of copper, basically, with enhanced, you know, with fins on it that I'm going to run the water through to pull the heat off of all the hot devices. In addition, we typically want to make this serviceable. So, in other words, we want to make it so that we can remove one GPU out of eight or four that are in there. That means that all those liquid connections have to have some sort of connector that allows us to remove the GPU without spilling liquid all over the place. So, in addition to the plumbing to just connect all the copper together that we're using to cool the processors, we also have manifolds and we have quick connects and we have hoses and other things. So, the liquid cooling infrastructure is actually quite significant and takes up a significant volume within the server today. So, as far as the cold plates themselves, they are essentially just think of it as basically a piece of two millimeter thick copper, maybe it's one, one and a half millimeters, depending. And then we've generally created people call them different things, but skyved fins or fins that are made by shaving a bit of copper off the surface and flipping it up. And the typical spacing is about 100 microns thick for the copper and about 100 micron spacing between. Historically, we called those microchannels. Microchannel cooling today has a different connotation. We can dive into that if we want, but they're typically about three millimeters tall. And we're going to try to arrange them such that we're flowing water through every one of those micro channels and pulling heat off. And that's non-trivial. But if we do so, they're very high performance. We can now cool a 1400-watt, 1800-watt processor using 45-degree C water. That's phenomenal. That's actually something we couldn't do three years ago. So a lot of progress has been made. And then a lot of additional technology and figuring out how to seal those things so they don't, you know, they don't leak easily. They can be shipped across the oceans and not burst or have any other problems. There's a lot, a lot of engineering has gone into the cold plates in a pretty short time to make them reliable and high performance. Can
you orient me a little bit on there's different architectures within liquid cooling and you hear these different terms? Just give me like the sense of direct-to-chip cooling, immersion cooling people talk about two-phase. Like what, how should I think about categorizing the different ways to do liquid cooling?
Direct-to-chip means bringing the coolant to the chip. That's why it's direct-to-chip. And that can be either single-phase or two-phase. So the dominant form today is single-phase direct-to-chip cooling using water with 25% propylene glycol mixed in. So it's basically, crudely speaking, it's basically the antifreeze that you pour into your car diluted to 25%. When you go buy it at the auto parts store, it's often 50% mixed, pre-mixed. The really important detail that you don't even think about when you go pick up a bottle of antifreeze is that that gallon jug that you have has a very small percentage, about 1% to 2% maybe, of a proprietary chemical mix called an inhibitor or inhibitor package that prevents corrosion. So your car has aluminum and brass and all sorts of other materials in it and lasts for years without corroding and falling apart. That's actually phenomenal. That's amazing. So our partners at, you know, like Valvoline and Dow and RicoChem, they've done an amazing job developing these coolants that are very long lasting and allow us to use many different materials in their systems. That's the same thing we have to pay attention to in the single-phase liquid cooling system. So that's single-phase liquid cooling. Two-phase liquid cooling is not yet really available at scale. There are companies working on it. I myself had a company that worked on this. So I'm a little, you know, have some history with this. But there are definitely products that are very close to commercialization in this space. And it's where you take a refrigerant, you pump it to the chip, and you literally boil the refrigerant off of the chips, you know, off of the fins. It looks really cool. Bubbles are great. It turns out. That the performance is very similar to single phase. It's not really superior in performance, but there are other benefits. I can use much smaller hoses and tubes and so on. So, remember, I was saying currently the DLC takes up a lot of real estate inside of the servers. Two-phase promises, again, not mass adopted yet, but promises to use a lot less space inside of the servers, leaving more space for innovation on the actual compute. Immersion can take two forms in single phase and two-phase. In single-phase, we use an immersion fluid, a coolant that is often derived from something like mineral oil, but it's generally much more sophisticated than this and has additives and other inhibitors as well. The problem with oil is if you know, if you can imagine it's a hot day and you're getting excited, you jump into the pool and that pool is filled with oil, that would feel pretty not great. It wouldn't cool you off, right? Because oil is actually itself a pretty poor heat transfer fluid. And so, it turns out that it's just not it, it's good for picking up low density heat from a large area. It's not great for picking up heat from the high-performance processors. Um, and so to do that, they're proposing the immersion community is proposing putting cold plates on the chips themselves and then picking up all the rest of the heat, you know, from those small devices with this immersion fluid. Um, and there are pros and cons of that, but that's the that's kind of the trajectory that they're on. Two-phase immersion is coming and going and coming again, maybe. Um, the challenge with that is I need to be able to have a fluid that boils and doesn't get doesn't allow the combination of vapor and liquid together in a container to get at too high of a pressure. It gets a little complicated here, but um, that boiling point of that fluid really matters because if the pressure rises even, you know, to a third of an atmosphere and I'm in a great big tank, that can create a lot of force on the lid and create a negative, you know, very bad situation. Um, so I have to manage that vapor, I have to manage the expansion, and it's a little complicated there. And there are other things we actually published, me and some colleagues published a paper on this about four years ago, three and a half years ago now that went into some of the details of the limitations of two-phase immersion. And it's again, going to be kind of stuck at lower power. It's still pretty high-powered, you know, like a thousand-watt processors, but it's kind of stuck there in that region for thermodynamic reasons. So, so really the emphasis in the industry is on the single-phase direct-to-chip cooling because it's ready to scale. We have a supply chain that's very robust worldwide. We have liquid coolant suppliers that are now able to provide high-quality coolant worldwide. This is what we need because we're at the state where we're producing and consuming hundreds of thousands of cold plates a month. And by next year, that could climb to maybe close to a million cold plates a month. I mean, this is crazy. You know, 2022, we might have been talking about 100,000 cold plates a year, right, in the whole industry. So, something on that order, right? And so we're just scaling super fast. And right now, the technology that can scale and keep up with it is single-phase direct-to-chip.
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Okay, so now explain the relationship between the cooling architecture and water consumption at the data center level.
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