Your next PC cooled by oil? The future of computer science will be liquid

What do you have in common a gaming laptop, an architect’s workstation and an AI training supercomputer? In 2025, all of these machines consume a lot of energy. And especially give off a lot of heat.

If some machines like Apple’s MacBook Air now have sufficiently efficient fleas to operate thanks to passive cooling-that is to say without fan (or other cooling mechanism)-this is not the case with the rest of the world of computer science.

It was enough to go through the aisles of the Nangang exhibition show during the Taiwan computex fair to jump out the treasures of efforts that the entire industry provides to cool the machines.

From the entrance to the Tainex 2 building, the tone is given, with a real exposure of the mechanical parts produced by the various partners of Nvidia to cool its chips. Not only is its powerful GPUs, but also its CPUs and even its network chips, which are now ultra-complex processors with billions of transistors.

Faced with fleas which are now approaching the kilowatt wall (1000 watts), one thing seems clear for industry: the big fan at dad is not enough. To cool these embers GPU, the solution has a name: the liquid cooling, or liquid cooling in the language of Antoine Dupont.

Direct to die and dip in hydrocarbons

The Liquid Cooling mention brings together two very different approaches, but both based on the use of a liquid. The first is a bit like what we know about Watercolated Gamers PCs, as they say in jargon. But far from being a simple AIO kit that we stick on fleas to cool as in high -end towers, water cooling of burning gpu racks takes place with industrial dissipators and pipes. Luxury plumbing which injects aqueous solutions directly on the surface of the target chip. Because no question of the slightest leak here.

The other method is called immersion cooling (cooling immersion). Here, the aqueous solution (therefore partly based on water) gives way to a advanced hydrocarbon. A fluid that allows you to distribute heat dissipation. If this oil does not aggressor the mother cards, all of the components and physical elements in contact with this solution must be qualified.

In both cases, part of the effectiveness of the method is due to the solutions formula. Who are chemistry jewelry from laboratories.

Chemistry at the rescue

If chemistry is at the heart of the hundreds of modern processors manufacturing steps, it is invisible to us when you buy or use a chip. But on the Castrol stand, division of the giant of BP hydrocarbons, the importance of Lake Himie is much more palpable. While we stroll near large aquarium of steel and glass, we can see mothering cards of server immersed in what seems to be water.

“”It is in fact a dielectric hydrocarbon (1)“, explains Wade Su, development director at BP. Colorless, on DC20 also odorless, as we have seen on the stand.”It accelerates the diffusion of heat and its chemical formula is. As for the colorful solution, it is not used in immersion. It is an aqueous solution composed of 75% water used for direct-cooling“, Specifies the engineer.

Victor Lozano, test engineer from the Spanish Submerry company who designs the immersion boxes, explains: “The use of immersion cooling depends both on the type of components and calculations that your servers will make. But it also depends on the country’s energy mix and the cost of energy in it“.

“”Well handled and well calibrated compared to these variables, cooling by immersion can divide by ten the energy bill linked to cooling (not the one linked to the food feeding, editor’s note), “he says.

Depending on the size of the basin and the loads of the fleas, these large boxes/aquarium can dispel the heat of clusters of several tens of kilowatts. “”The sustainability of the components is in every way comparable to that of the machines cooled by air. And the oil is completely recyclable“, He assures us.

Supply supplies

All this calorific energy that must be dissipated comes from the electrical energy used and transformed by the silicon chips. Fleas, which are not only always larger and more efficient, but which are especially more and more expensive: at $ 30,000 the NVIDIA B300 GPU – which rushes to 1400W all by itself! – The amortization of these tens of thousands of GPUs involves a maximized occupancy rate.

Which causes increasingly large and powerful electrical equipment. But this inflation of the Supercalculators power supplies, some of which correspond to the total production of a nuclear reactor, does not affect only the huge data centers: even the Atx type power supplies of our PC Tours are starting to take overweight.

Like this Asus monster who, with his 3000W on the clock, returns to the second division the titans of 1500W of yesteryear. And do not believe that it is a prestigious product. According to the Asus teams that we were able to question on the spot, “The demand for this type of food is very important. Many manufacturers came to see our diet to supply their machines“We were assured.

Local AI will also push consumption upwards

The raison d’être of such a monster is simple: it is a question of fueling the work stations that Nvidia presented at the Computex. These servers with RTX Pro 6000 professional card bases (600W per chip!) Can indeed contain up to eight GPU. Creating real small supercomputers for businesses.

Machines dedicated to executing locally – and therefore under control – the AI ​​models of companies, large and small, which do not want to see their intellectual property for a walk in the cloud. But who will push their energy (local) energy bill and their cooling needs.

If it will be necessary to rely on long -term data to do the accounts, between what the AI ​​could save time and energy, the rise in power and the current dissemination of large models of languages ​​have an obvious impact: for the time being, the emergency is to the explosion of consumption and with it, of heat dissipation.

(1): A non -electricity material.

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