Liquid Cooling Technology Ushers in a New Era of AI Server Cooling
Power Consumption Surges, Air Cooling Soon to Be Outdated In traditional general-purpose servers, the CPU is often the main contributor to computing power and also the "power hog" of the entire system. However, since entering the era of AI servers, AI accelerators such as GPUs and TPUs have become the primary sources of computing power. Although this architecturally reduces CPU power consumption, the power consumption per server rack has only increased. For instance, NVIDIA released the new-generation AI superchip GB200 this year, along with the GB200 NVL72 single-rack solution based on this chip. GB200 NVL72 represents NVIDIA's first server solution that fully embraces liquid cooling, given that the configuration of 36 CPUs + 72 GPUs exceeds 100kW in power consumption. Traditional air-cooling solutions struggle to maintain high cooling efficiency in the face of such high overall system power consumption, adversely impacting the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of entire A