> Liquids like mineral oil, etc to be the cooling agent yet it never gains measured adoption. I've never seen a serious attempt to do mineral oil cooling outsi

> Liquids like mineral oil, etc to be the cooling agent yet it never gains measured adoption. I've never seen a serious attempt to do mineral oil cooling outside of funny gag setups. It was never really pitched as a future of cooling. There's other attempts at other liquids for submersion cooling, but that always seems like a bit of a stretch. Beyond that, liquid cooling has taken over. That Hitachi post, for example, seems to be about AIOs which are now very common on desktops with the AIO market exploding over the last ~5 years. Nearly every laptop also employs a form of "liquid cooling" these days with either heatpipes or vapor chambers. As for "what makes this time different" for the datacenter, well heat density continues to rise. >100 CPU cores per 2U rack are trivial to achieve now, and more are readily plausible. GPU accelerators are also more common than ever, and are pushing staggering power draws (like the 8x 400W NVIDIA A100 in a single 4U chasis the article talks about). You can keep spending more power on fans, but there's diminishing returns there not to mention the power consumption of the fans themselves becomes non-trivial.