Water cold plates lead in the small, but growing, world of DLC

Direct liquid cooling (DLC), including cold plate and immersion systems, is becoming more common in data centers — but so far this transition has been gradual and unevenly distributed with some data centers using it widely, others not at all. The use of DLC in 2024 still accounts for only a small minority of the world’s IT servers, according to the recent Uptime Institute Cooling Systems Survey 2024. The adoption of DLC remains slow in general-purpose business IT, and the most substantial deployments currently concentrate on high-performance computing applications, such as academic research, engineering, AI model development and cryptocurrency.

This year’s cooling systems survey results continue a trend: of those operators that use DLC in some form, the greatest number of operators deploy water cold plate systems, with other DLC types trailing significantly. Multiple DLC types will grow in adoption over the next few years, and many installations will be in hybrid cooling environments where they share space and infrastructure with air-cooling equipment.