S1 Ep3: Chilled & Charged -Fresh Perspectives on Power and Cooling for Datacenters

Power and cooling.

You know, everybody's talking about liquid cooling and as the next big step, right? Is that actually, you know, really true today? And where's the market going? You know, what's the reality of this situation?

Yeah, you know, at least from our perspective, and I just give a little bit of context about Solace's history with data centers.

We've done a lot of data center work over the past 20 years.

for more.

But in the last, I would say three or four years, our contracts and revenue from data center design has exploded.

And it's currently in our business unit, almost 50% of our revenue.

So it's I mean, the data center boom is real.

So from at least the developers that we're working with, what we're finding is the liquid cooling is really the technology is real.

It is being pushed to almost all data center designs.

I would say that from our perspective, when you start to get into real small enterprise data centers that are less than 10 megawatt year, even maybe five megawatt year, it might still be into the air-cooled you know, data center systems.

And once you start to push that 10 to 20 megawatt is when they really turn over to liquid cooling.

Which today, you know, most of the projects that we're working on are easily over the 20 megawatt threshold.

We're doing a lot in the 50 to 100 megawatt and then some upwards of 300 megawatt.

So You know, very large scale data centers.

And so almost all of them are for the chip based are all liquid cooling, which really does open up a little bit more potential for increased efficiencies and other technologies to help solve the cooling problem.

Now, I would add, as the packing density for compute requirements increases, is getting exponentially, it grows exponentially.

There's also, there's a point at which air cooling loses its shine.

And it's not as efficient.

You've got to oversize the system.

There's a lot of losses.

A lot of spaces, they do not need that much cooling, do get cooled.

And so I think that's where, like Brian is alluding to, is the liquid delivery for the heat transfer.

Liquid is clearly a lot better option.

And even from a form factor perspective, they are getting introduced into the rack level and also the chip level.