Castrol Dipping Point report: Data centres must adopt new cooling
A new report from Castrol, one of the world’s leading lubricant brands, has revealed that industry leaders believe current data centre cooling systems will struggle to meet the increasing demands of artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and edge computing. The survey, ‘The Dipping Point’, highlights the urgent need for data centres to transition to immersion cooling technology within the next three years.
The survey report is based on responses from 600 data centre industry leaders surveyed across seven geographical regions – the U.S., China, Germany, the Nordics, the UK, Canada, and Ireland.
The findings indicate that nearly three-quarters (74%) of data centre professionals believe traditional air-cooling methods will not be able to cope with rising data traffic, with the same proportion asserting that immersion cooling is the only viable solution for meeting future compute power requirements.
“As the demands on data centres soar, how we cool servers will become increasingly important. However, the industry clearly believes that we are fast approaching the limit of current air-cooled infrastructure. More data processing creates more heat, and rapid or sustained overheating will cause servers and hardware to malfunction or break, resulting in data loss, downtime and disruption to critical dependent services,” said Peter Huang, global vice president – Data Centre, Thermal Management, Castrol.
“We have never experienced such rapid advancement in chip density. Over the past 20 years, a CPU generation has typically lasted three-to-five years. Now, we’re seeing two generations per year to meet the demands of increasingly power-intensive applications. This surge brings increased heat and rack density, and while traditional air-cooling systems remain effective for lower power density chips and racks, they struggle with anything over 50 KW. With future requirements approaching 1,000 KW, enhanced cooling infrastructure will be essential for data centres to keep pace.”
The report also found that 76% of experts believe immersion cooling will significantly reduce energy and water consumption in data centres, while 77% see it as the key to handling large-scale data processing, storage, and distribution effectively.
Industry leaders predict that immersion cooling will become the dominant data centre cooling technology by 2027. Those failing to transition could risk falling behind competitors who are already investing in next-generation cooling infrastructure.
