Data centers take the plunge

As anyone who has spilled coffee on a laptop knows, liquids and electronics don’t mix. But as anyone who has sat down with a laptop also knows, they get pretty hot.The same also applies to computers at much larger scale: data centers. And these installations are getting hotter and hotter as they increasingly run artificial intelligence and mine for cryptocurrency with complex chips. The fans and air conditioners that have traditionally kept them cool will soon no longer cut it.Data centers may have to resort to dunking the electronics in liquid—albeit nonconductive dielectric liquids, which won’t harm the electronics but will cool them much better than air can. It will be like the difference on a sweltering day between walking into an air-conditioned building and jumping into a pool.Liquid cooling is more efficient than air. Up to 40% of the energy consumed by a typical data center goes toward keeping it from overheating. Immersion cooling could reduce that inefficiency and the alarming impact data centers can have on power and water consumption—as well as the greenhouse gases that often go with it. The concept isn’t as exotic as it sounds. Fluids have long been used to manage heat in electric transformers. And back in the 1980s, the Cray-2 supercomputer used a 3M fluorinated coolant called Fluorinert, though the fluid has a high global warming potential and can decompose into toxic products.A number of chemical makers see a new market. They include ExxonMobil and Shell, which supply hydrocarbon-based fluids; Cargill, which