CoolIT showed off a new 4000W cold plate for liquid cooling this week. What is neat about this design is that it is one that can extend the longevity of single-phase direct liquid cooling well beyond the next generation or two of accelerators.
CoolIT Shows off a 4kW Coldplate for Liquid Cooling
Here is a look at the coldplate. We can see the inlet and outlet nozzles and then what looks like a test fixture that it is attached to.
The copper coldplate is said to be able to cool that 4000W at a flow rate of 6L per minute. That is higher than we see in most of today’s coldplates, but that seems to be the price of trying to cool a lot more.
Back in 2022, before liquid cooling was seemingly everywhere, STH went up to CoolIT in Calgary and showed How Liquid Cooling is Prototyped and Tested in the CoolIT Liquid Lab Tour:
We also showed an entire system being assembled, in our How Liquid Cooling Servers Works with Gigabyte and CoolIT here:
We filmed both videos on the same trip. Also, that second video is still very relevant today especially given that NVIDIA GTC 2025 is coming up next week. We fully expect NVIDIA to get even more into liquid cooling with its future products as TDPs rise. Accelerators are driving a lot of the need for liquid cooling. CPUs in the 500-600W maximum range can still be air-cooled. The next frontier is the systems like we showed briefly in the first video that were used in some of the HPE Cray supercomputers that are completely liquid cooled.
Final Words
In the industry, there is a question of whether direct to chip liquid cooling is still going to be the dominant method of cooling racks when we go past 500kW per rack in 2027. Our guess is that CoolIT’s announcement this week was to help with discussions next week at GTC about single phase DLC versus phase change cooling and immersion cooling avenues.
