Removing heat from IT equipment has been a problem for as long as computers have existed. Liquid cooling, a new concept to many, has actually been used to cool computer equipment since the 1960s when IBM employed it for the System 360 mainframes. There were few options to cool that amount of heat at the time. Today, with decades of air cooling behind us, data centers are returning to liquid cooling, using a new generation of systems.
The introduction of complementary metal–oxide–semiconductors (CMOS) radically reduced the power consumption and, therefore, the heat generated by the semiconductors used to build computer systems. That’s how air cooling became the gold standard.