On March 4, liquid-cooled server concept stocks opened higher. Intel Technology, Invic, Jialitu, Kehua Data, etc. rose sharply. On the news side, Nvidia said that starting from B100GPU, the heat dissipation technology of all products in the future will be changed from air cooling to liquid cooling.
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What is a liquid-cooled server?
To put it simply, a liquid-cooled server is to inject liquid into the server and take away the heat from the server through hot and cold exchange. Imagine taking a "shower" or "bath" for a server. Liquid-cooled servers have a variety of technologies such as cold plate liquid cooling and immersion liquid cooling, and are the new favorites of the server industryIn the movie "The Wandering Earth 2", the quantum scientist Tu Hengyu played by Andy Lau started the root server in "liquid cooling".
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Why did the liquid-cooled server concept catch fire?
First of all, it is policy-driven, and it is imperative to save energy and reduce consumption in data centers. In August 2022, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and other seven departments jointly issued the Action Plan for Green and Low-Carbon Development of the Information and Communication Industry (2022-2025), which proposes that by 2025, the power utilization efficiency (PUE) of new large-scale and super-large data centers in the country will be reduced to 1Below 3, the energy efficiency of 5G base stations will be increased by more than 20%, and the PUE of the rebuilt core computer room will be reduced to 15 or less.
According to industry insiders, the current average PUE of China's data centers is 149, and still half of the regional data center PUE is located in 15 or more.
The second is that the replacement of traditional air-cooled servers is imminent. At present, the mainstream air-cooled technology occupies more than 90% of the market share of the heat dissipation server market, but the PUE of air-cooled servers is mostly 14 above, can no longer meet the new policy requirements. Only liquid cooling can meet the technical specifications, for example, immersion liquid cooling can reach 11 or less. Compared with air cooling, liquid cooling has the advantages of high heat exchange efficiency, low noise, and small footprint, and is expected to accelerate the introduction of liquid cooling technology under the requirements of green and low-carbon construction, and become the mainstream technology for heat dissipation of data centers in the future.
The third is to improve computing power and expand the market demand for liquid-cooled servers. As the power consumption of servers increases and computing power increases, the demand for heat dissipation also increases. According to market analysts, under the wave of AI large models, AI servers integrate traditional CPU chips and high-power GPU chips, resulting in a surge in the power of the whole machine. For example, the NVIDIA A100 SXM chip consumes up to 400W on a single card, while the GPU thermal power consumption of an 8-card AI server can reach a total of 32kw。The power consumption of AI servers has increased by more than ten times.
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What is the market space for liquid-cooled servers?
IDC data shows that in the first half of 2023, the size of China's liquid-cooled server market will reach 6600 million US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 2833%, which is expected to reach 15$100 million. IDC predicts that China's liquid-cooled server market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 54 from 2022 to 20277%, and the market size will reach $8.9 billion in 2027.
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Who is buying liquid-cooled servers and who is selling?
According to the IDC report, Internet manufacturers are the largest buyers of China's liquid-cooled server market in the first half of 2023, with 54% of shipments in the first half of the year purchased by Internet companies, and are expected to continue to increase the procurement of liquid-cooled servers in the next few years. **Public utilities and education occupy a secondary market share; Industries such as telecommunications, finance, and services have also seen a steady increase in deployment.
From the perspective of manufacturer sales, the top three manufacturers in the market share in the first half of 2023 are Inspur Information, Ningchang and Super Fusion, accounting for about 70% of the market share. More and more mainstream IT equipment manufacturers have publicly stated that they will increase R&D efforts and accelerate the iteration of liquid cooling products, and China's liquid cooling server market will continue to maintain rapid growth in the future.
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What is the layout of the liquid-cooled server business of A-share companies?
Recently, a number of A-share listed companies have responded to investors about the layout of liquid-cooled server business.
ZTE said on the investor interactive platform that at present, the company's full range of servers support liquid cooling, and the performance of high-performance liquid-cooled servers ranks among the top in the industry, which can meet the needs of diversified computing scenarios such as intelligent computing and high-performance computing. At the same time, the company's liquid-cooled servers use multiple security mechanisms to ensure application reliability, AI tuning technology to reduce energy consumption, and elastic architecture solutions to support simplified delivery and intelligent O&M. In 2023, the company's liquid-cooled servers will be launched for commercial use at China Mobile.
Kehua data said that the company's liquid cooling technology can solve the heat dissipation problems of chips and systems with high power, high heat flux density and high computing density, greatly improve the computing power output capacity, and enable the server to run at full load in a relatively low temperature environment, and this technology can be applied to major intelligent computing centers.
Gaolan said that the customers of the company's data center liquid cooling products are mainly leading Internet manufacturers.
Chuanrun Co., Ltd. said that the company's liquid cooling business has been carried out in an orderly manner, and has continued to obtain orders and deliveries from international and domestic customers.
Sugon said that the company's liquid-cooled data center solutions can be used for the construction of multi-field data centers, among which cold-plate liquid cooling is mainly used for medium and high-density data centers, and immersion liquid cooling is used for the construction of high-density data centers (18-30kW per square meter of power per cabinet).
Calito said that the company's CPU liquid cooling technology development and design objectives and main contents include: the integration of liquid cooling system, the advantages and disadvantages of cold plate and immersion systems, the design of liquid cooling systems, boiling heat exchange research, coolant cooling research, and liquid cooling system application research.
Reviewer: Xiong Yonghong Editor: Jiao Yuanyuan Proofreader: Zhang Diange Producer: Zhang Nan.
Issued by: Ding Jianming.