As high-powered computing pushes to the most rugged geographies on the globe, liquid immersion cooling firms are finding new opportunities for modular data centers.
Imagine a sand-swept military forward base, a sea of tents in the Afghanistan desert. One of these tents is the command post, which usually houses the data center, the “brain” of the camp. Here there are rack shelves of tightly packed blade servers, powered by diesel generators and cooled by submersion in protective fluid-filled compartments. There is no need to worry about contaminating the electronics with sand or rain. There are no breakable moving parts, like fans, heat exchangers, and pumps inside the server chassis. There is no need for high ceilings, raised floors, or aisles to circulate air. And there is no extra infrastructure like chillers, air conditioners, and compressors to drive the cooling process. With liquid immersion, the size of fluid coolers, where heat is recycled or rejected, can be reduced by about half.