Data center immersion cooling, or the process of submerging servers into a heat-absorbing mineral oil, exists in a very small portion of the market. But the adoption of immersion cooling is nearing its tipping point as thermal management becomes a growing concern within data centers, according to Dell’Oro Group analyst Lucas Beran.

Traditional air-based cooling systems “are actually pretty good at managing and efficiently removing heat from a data center,” Beran said. But when those heat loads become more dense, air-based cooling becomes less effective. 

“Essentially, you just have to blow colder air or faster air to continue to remove more and more heat,” which calls for more operational spending and energy usage, Beran explained.

“From a more dense computing deployment perspective, [immersion cooling] starts to become a necessity” for lowering electricity usage, increasing operational efficiency savings, and reducing a data center’s overall carbon footprint, he said. 

With an immersion cooling system, mineral oil captures heat produced by servers. That heat is then pumped into a coolant distribution unit (CDU) where a heat exchanger transfers the heat to a different liquid — usually water. The system them chills this water and rejects the heat into the atmosphere. Alternatively, the water travels through a warm water loop before the heat is rejected via a cooling tower.

“The only energy required [with immersion cooling] is for the CDU to pump the liquid through the rack, extract that heat, and then take it out of the rack,” Beran explained. 

This means less capital is needed to deploy an immersion cooling system because there are fewer moving parts involved with removing heat such as fans and other electrical infrastructure. “You just use less energy to remove that heat,” Beran said.

In total, immersion cooling can decrease opex costs by 33% compared to traditional air-based cooling systems, Beran wrote in a blog post. And when considering the total cost of ownership over 10 years, “it’s achievable for an immersion-cooled data center to cost half as much as a traditional air-cooled build,” Beran added.

Within three to five years, immersion cooling will become “a prominent way to deal with [thermal management],” Beran said, though adoption in the near- to medium-term future will likely begin in hybrid environments that use both traditional air-based cooling and immersion cooling. 

“In those hybrid environments, you still have to utilize some of the traditional infrastructure, so you don't necessarily see cost savings associated with that [right away],” Beran noted.

Although immersion cooling is most prevalent within the supercomputing space, it’s beginning to shift into the enterprise as well. “You don't necessarily need to be operating a supercomputer to have the need for [immersion cooling],” Beran said.

Just how far can immersion cooling propel data centers on their paths to net-zero? Immersion cooling accounts for about 25% of the solution to reduce a data center’s carbon footprint, Beran said.

And while this system lowers energy consumption on the operational side, it also offers more avenues for sustainable innovation. Due to the increased efficiency of immersion-cooled data centers, there’s a “wider reach [of] computing resources that can further help solve problems that we weren't solving before,” Beran explained. 

But fear of change across the data center industry is a potential hurdle that immersion cooling will need to overcome. “I think people in the data center industry let that fear slow down innovation — not stop it — but prevent us from enacting change faster,” Beran said.