How Liquid Cooling Is Transforming Data Centers Amid the New Infrastructure Boom

1. Unstoppable Heat: The Rise of Liquid Cooling

“New infrastructure” acceleration has put data centers in the spotlight. According to He Baohong, director of the Cloud Computing and Big Data Institute at the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, high‑density computing drives the emergence of liquid cooling, which could reshape the entire data‑center ecosystem.

The proliferation of cloud computing, big data, and AI has increased server performance and energy consumption, making traditional air cooling insufficient. Immersion liquid cooling is now mature; its ecosystem is still developing, but costs are expected to drop as technology improves.

Industry trials show immersion cooling can increase compute density by more than tenfold and reduce floor space by over 75 %, cutting it to a quarter of the original size.

Beyond efficiency and cost, liquid cooling lowers failure rates because it eliminates airflow‑induced vibration that harms equipment stability and lifespan.

He emphasizes that switching from air to liquid cooling changes not only the cooling method but also server and data‑center design, potentially sparking a cascade of innovations.

Liquid cooling is already applied in aerospace, animation, and may expand to industrial, automotive, and manufacturing sectors.

2. Data Centers as the Pinnacle of Technological Innovation

In the context of accelerated “new infrastructure,” data centers have become a star attraction. He notes that the simultaneous mention of 5G and data centers signals their status as key innovation hubs.

From a network perspective, the consumer‑facing side is 5G, while the service‑oriented side is the data center, essentially a massive internet endpoint. As traffic grows, data centers evolve from network‑centric to independent domains, concentrating traffic, services, complexity, talent, capital, and innovation.