Immersion Cooling Market in Data Centers - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022-2027)

The immersion cooling market in data centers is registering an estimated CAGR of 26.06% during the forecast period. The increasing carbon footprint of the data centers is one of the major reasons leading to the increased adoption of advanced liquid cooling technology, such as immersion cooling.

Key Highlights

• The increase in the number of hyper-scale data centers is driving the market as hyper-scale data centers are broadly used in different sectors to increase computing ability, memory, networking infrastructure, or storage resources. The features of hyper-scale data centers include the physical infrastructure and distribution systems that support the data centers to maximize cooling efficiency and scale computing tasks quicker and faster.
• Dealing with high-density power consumption is driving the market, as many industry estimates put cooling costs at around 40% of the data center's energy consumption. The immersion cooling can reduce the data center's energy usage by over 60%, with some systems stating it could be as much as a 95% reduction. For many data centers, this provides millions of dollars in savings annually.
• The increasing carbon footprint of the data centers is another major issue leading to the increased adoption of advanced liquid cooling technology, such as immersion cooling. In a recent study conducted by company 3M, a prominent synthetic coolant provider in the immersion cooling market, it was identified that 38% of the electricity needed in data centers equipped with traditional air-based cooling technologies is utilized to cool the electronic components.
• High investment with greater capital expenditure is restraining the market growth, as a requirement of specialized infrastructure is needed and hence needs to be justified with a longer-term ROI in mind.
• The recent COVID-19 outbreak posed additional stress on multiple economies across various sectors. This shifted the focus toward a digital economy. Considering the role of immersion cooling, as the data centers manage more next-generation applications like the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence, they require higher-density processors, which produce more heat, thus requiring more cooling power.

Key Market Trends

Dealing with High-Density Power Consumption

• There has been an increasing rise in investment in high-density data centers and high-performance computing applications. Moreover, due to technological progress, faster microprocessors will become available each year, and cheap HPC systems with a few processors will offer a performance that could formerly be achieved only by expensive vector computers or MPP systems. Thus, high-performance computers are no longer limited to specialized architectures but contribute to a high end of a continuum of fast desktop systems and servers.
• The advent of the internet of things (IoT) has enabled all the devices’ interconnectivity, turning every device into a data point that can be tracked and translated into insight and learning. This allows many organizations to invest in automation and artificial intelligence, conjuring new ways to make users’ professional and personal lives more efficient. Rapid development in the manufacturing sector and industry 4.0 trends are also responsible for the boom in HPC applications.
• With many computing processes moving to cloud platforms and software systems becoming more standardized, companies are looking at incorporating HPC into their data operations. The biggest challenge associated with data center HPC is power requirements.
• The increasing complexity of high-performance computing (HPC) applications requires the mathematical number-crunching genius of GPUs working side-by-side with a server’s main CPU to accelerate crucial algorithms. These compute-intensive applications have brought GPU-accelerated servers, and they cause heat dissipation problems in many data centers globally.
• As power and heat loads are increasingly pushed within the data center, more sophisticated cooling, such as immersion, is required by data centers to meet those demands. LiquidStack launched in March 2021 as a stand-alone company with USD 10 million in Series A funding from hyper-scale hardware maker Wiwynn is ambitious to address the growing cooling challenges in cloud data centers and high-performance computing (HPC).

North America to Hold the Dominant Share

• North America dominates the immersion cooling market primarily due to the presence of a large number of data centers in the region, along with the rising popularity of such cooling methods for data centers, especially in the United States.
• The US-based company, 3M Company, is a prominent provider of fluids related to immersion cooling technology. 3M Fluorinert liquids have the highest dielectric strength and electrical resistivity of all organic fluids, much better than air. And unlike hydrocarbon liquids such as mineral oil, 3M Fluorinert liquids are entirely fluorinated.
• Moreover, the mobile data traffic in the United States increased considerably over the years, from 1.26 exabytes per month of data traffic in 2017 to 7.75 exabytes per month of data traffic by 2022, as reported by Cisco Systems. According to Ericsson, this data traffic is expected to triple further by 2030. Thus, the distributed cloud that can secure the low latency and high bandwidth required to connect such scale easily is coming into action.
• Companies are rigorously investing in data centers to meet the growing demand from respective operations. For instance, in April 2021, Microsoft announced the installation of a new liquid immersion cooling infrastructure at a data center in Washington, saving water and lowering energy costs. This shift to two-phase liquid immersion cooling provides increased flexibility for adequately managing cloud resources. For instance, software that manages cloud resources can allocate sudden spikes in data center compute demand to the liquid-cooled tanks' servers, as these servers can run at high power, a process called overclocking, without the risk of overheating.
• Furthermore, in March 2021, Submer, a prominent provider of immersion cooling solutions, announced its latest agreement with SYNNEX Corporation, a provider of distribution, systems design, and integration services for the technology industry. In the agreement, Submer's portfolio of liquid cooling and edge-ready solutions will be manufactured in the United States and distributed by SYNNEX. The deal will allow the company to continue expanding its footprint in the United States, improving its reach.

Competitive Landscape

The degree of competition in the market studied is high and is expected to increase over the forecast period. The current market includes a number of companies vying for attention where the total addressable market is high. However, certain companies are strongly backed by government funding or investors. For instance, Iceotope is backed by Schneider Electric, which also has data center cooling solutions. GRC also recently acquired its series funding to become USD 15 million in total funds.

• August 2021 - Submer Technology, a leading creator of sophisticated immersion cooling solutions for cloud and edge computing data centers, announced a partnership with Hypertec. Immersion liquid cooling allows data centers to keep up with the growing demand for better power density while also providing protection from the outside elements that could harm the hardware.
• August 2021 - Green Revolution Cooling (GRC), in collaboration with Intel, announced a partnership aimed at testing the reliability and safety of this tech and optimizing the system performance of immersion-cooled racks powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
• August 2021 - Intel and Submer teamed up to develop the Precision Immersion Cooling Fluid Cloud for next-generation data centers. This Precision Immersion Cooling Fluid Cloud idea incorporates a precision immersion cooling architecture within each node to achieve the next level of efficiency and density by rethinking the usage of IT thermals.

Additional Benefits:

• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
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