Intel committed $700 million to develop immersion liquid cooling technology for datacenters.
Intel announced a $700 million investment in a new research and development facility dedicated to designing next-generation immersion liquid cooling solutions and other data center-oriented technologies. The company simultaneously introduced the industry's first open intellectual property immersion liquid cooling solution and reference design, enabling data centers to adopt immersion liquid cooling without investing in expensive custom solutions.
The company's first step toward democratizing immersion liquid cooling commenced with the introduction of an open IP reference design for an easy-to-deploy and easily scalable total immersion liquid cooling solution. This reference design, to be completed in collaboration with Intel Taiwan and across the Taiwanese ecosystem in a phased approach, targets server manufacturers and suppliers, with many server OEMs based in Taiwan.
Intel plans to establish its new Oregon Research and Design Mega Lab on its Jones Farm campus, dedicated to immersion cooling, water usage effectiveness, and heat recapture and reuse. Construction of the new center began immediately, with operations scheduled to commence in late 2023. The lab will ensure that Intel's future data center products—including Xeon, Optane, network interfaces, switch gear, Agilex FPGAs, Xe accelerators, Habana accelerators, and other products under development—are ready for immersion liquid cooling deployment.
Modern Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs have a thermal design power of around 270W per socket, while artificial intelligence and high-performance computing accelerators can consume up to 700W of power per OAM or SXM5 socket. With heat dissipation reaching around 6000W per machine, air and liquid cooling are losing attractiveness in terms of costs and efficiency, as power consumed by chillers accounts for 35% to 40% of total data center power consumption, according to 2SRSi data. Intel believes immersion liquid cooling with energy reuse could reduce data center cooling power consumption and carbon emissions, making data centers cheaper to operate and lowering pollution.
However, virtually all existing immersion liquid cooling deployments use expensive proprietary hardware designs. To make immersion liquid cooling more accessible to mainstream customers, Intel has worked with various ILC specialists over the past year. As Sandra L. Rivera, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and AI Group, stated: "Intel's dedication to its global partnerships is evident with these announcements today. The future of the data center and data center design is based on innovative and sustainable technologies and practices, and I am proud of the work we are doing every day to help make a sustainable future a reality."