>In pursuit of ever-higher compute density, chipmakers are juicing their chips with more and more power, and according to the Uptime Institute... Because that'

>In pursuit of ever-higher compute density, chipmakers are juicing their chips with more and more power, and according to the Uptime Institute... Because that's what the market wants/wanted. The Silicon people aren't working in a vacuum, they're talking to customers. >this could spell trouble for many legacy datacenters ill equipped to handle new, higher wattage systems. The limits of air cooling - forced or natural convection - has been on everyone's radar for a long time. Any hyperscaler or DC operator worth their salt knows you aren't going to load up a rack in a legacy air cooled data hall with CPUs at these TDPs. These chips require new DCs with new cooling systems or legacy DCs to be retrofitted with the appropriate equipment. Precision / direct to chip cooling - good but has lots of connectors. You get to use water as your coolant which has great thermal properties and it's cheap. The risk is that you can get water in your equipment. Immersion in another option which comes in 2 flavors: single phase or 2 phase (the coolant boils). Both options require a high volume of coolant which is expensive. 2 phase immersion has the added challenge of needing a sealed enclosure, otherwise the coolant will leak while it is a vapor. You also have concerns about pressure relief that need to be addressed. On top of all that, there's material compatibility issues between the coolants and the PCBs. You're also not meant to immerse your fiber connections. Spray cooling eliminates the need for high volume of coolant but comes with it's own set of problems. It's still very exotic, used in defense applications.