Intel to build $700 million immersion cooling development lab

Intel has invested $700 million to build a lab to research and develop immersion (immersion) server cooling technology.
The company also unveiled the industry's first open-licensed immersion liquid cooling solution, which will allow data center (datacenter) owners to implement immersion cooling without having to invest in costly custom solutions.Image source: SubmerThe company's new 18,58,000 m2 lab will be located at the Hillsborough campus near Portland, USA.
The new facility will design, test and verify new immersion cooling technologies for Xeon-based systems, Optane, Agilex FPGAs, Habana gas pedals and other Intel products that are in development or have been introduced to the market.
Construction of the facility began just today.
It's scheduled to be operational in 2023.Image source: IntelThe servers cool up to 40% of the data center's energy costs per year.
And the computing equipment itself in a data center consumes a lot of power.
For example, modern Intel Xeon Scalable processors have a maximum TDP of about 270 W.
Modern high-performance AI compute gas pedals, in turn, consume up to 700 watts per chip.
Given that a server based on such solutions can generate a total of about 6000 W of heat, traditional air and liquid cooling systems lose their appeal in terms of energy consumption and efficiency.Immersion liquid cooling is more effective in this matter, says Intel, because it allows not only a better transfer of heat, but can also be used for example in heating systems for residential and infrastructure facilities.
Immersion liquid cooling also makes it possible to make computing nodes more compact while increasing the density of computing systems.To make immersion cooling systems more accessible to interested customers, Intel has been actively working with various experts on this technology for the past year.