Author: Eric You, LITEON Advanced Mechanical Infrastructure
As next-generation AI accelerators boost thermal design power (TDP) from H100-class 700W envelopes to 1000W and beyond, the existing airflow paradigm becomes a bottleneck.
Yet, rack-scale hot-spot management gets tougher. Peak computing may be limited by thermal throttling, transient instability, and overbuilt room-level air conditioning without better heat-transfer efficiency.
Since data center cooling accounts for up to 40% of energy usage, thermal design is one of the efficiency levers. Thus, AI data center cooling is turning toward liquid loops to transport heat closer to the silicon, reduce fan and chiller reliance, and drop PUE from air-cooled levels to more efficient ones.
＊PUE = Power Usage Effectiveness = Total Facility Power ÷ IT Equipment Power
A 2024 global survey found that the average data center PUE was 1.56. So, many data centers are no longer seeing big efficiency improvements from traditional facility upgrades alone. They now need bigger changes in power architecture, cooling design, and system integration.
The bigger change is architectural. Since liquid cooling converts more watts into computation, operators improve node density, TCO, and ESG metrics, as well as reduce cooling overhead and recover rack space. But this only works when the supply chain stops buying cooling separately.
Formerly, power shelves, racks, control logic, pipes, and cooling distribution units were sourced separately, causing compatibility issues and ownership confusion during deployment and service.
LITEON simplifies validation, accountability, maintenance planning, and lifecycle support in AI data center cooling by connecting long-term power R&D with rack-level liquid-cooling integration. It gives customers one coordinated path, including power delivery and heat removal.
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