2021 Data Center High‑Quality Development Conference Highlights Liquid‑Cooling Innovations and Industry Standards

The 2021 Data Center High‑Quality Development Conference, jointly organized by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, was held in Beijing.

The event unveiled the Data Center Industry Development Index, a low‑carbon data‑center white paper, and announced the DC‑Tech Innovation Pioneer award, which Alibaba Cloud won for its "Liquid‑Cooled Cloud Computing Data Center Technology Innovation and Industrialization" project.

Guided by the national "14th Five‑Year Plan" and the 2035 vision, high‑quality development of the data‑center industry has become a key task, with data centers serving as essential digital infrastructure; globally, while total numbers decline, ultra‑large, high‑tech data centers are on the rise.

In China, the data‑center sector has maintained an average 30% growth over the past five years, transitioning from traditional facilities to new‑type centers featuring high compute power, efficiency, and advanced technology, while confronting cooling challenges posed by dense workloads—where liquid‑cooling has shown clear advantages.

After more than five years of iteration and practice, Alibaba has progressed from laboratory experiments to small‑scale pilots and finally to large‑scale commercial liquid‑cooling solutions, accumulating extensive experience in R&D, construction, delivery, and operation.

Alibaba also leads the formulation and release of multiple liquid‑cooling standards, including the open "Immersed Liquid‑Cooling Data Center Technical Specification," fostering consensus and an open ecosystem for large‑scale cloud data‑center infrastructure.

Through collaboration with dozens of partners—from chips to full servers and infrastructure management—Alibaba has achieved a breakthrough from zero to one, laying a solid foundation for solving the thermal challenges of high‑density, high‑power cloud‑computing environments.

Technical experts from Alibaba Cloud's liquid‑cooling team presented frontier research on signal integrity in immersed liquid cooling, covering material physical properties, impacts on PCB transmission lines, and the latest effects on high‑speed connectors, with ongoing investment to support next‑generation liquid‑cooling products.