The ultimate liquid cooling: heat rejection into water

Uptime Institute’s data on power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a testament to the progress the data center industry has made in energy efficiency over the past 10 years. However, global average PUEs have been largely stalling at close to 1.6 since 2018, with only marginal gains. This makes sense: for the average figure to show substantial improvement, most facilities would require financially unviable overhauls to their cooling systems to achieve notably better efficiencies, while modern builds already operate near the physical limits of air cooling.

A growing number of operators are looking to direct liquid cooling (DLC) for the next leap in infrastructure efficiency. But a switch to liquid cooling at scale involves operational and supply chain complexities that challenge even the most resourceful technical organizations. Uptime is aware of only one major operator that runs DLC as standard: French hosting and cloud provider OVHcloud, which is an outlier with a vertically integrated infrastructure using custom in-house water cold plate and server designs.