Capital Cost Analysis of Immersive Liquid-Cooled vs. Air-Cooled Large Data Centers

Brief summary of this white paper

There are several known benefits of choosing liquid cooling over traditional air cooling including energy savings. Capital cost, however, is viewed as a common obstacle.

In this paper, we first demonstrate that at a like-for-like rack density of 10 kW in a 2 MW data center, the data center capex is roughly equal for both a traditional air-cooled data center and a chassis-based immersive liquid cooled data center.

Because high density compaction is a key benefit of liquid cooling, we also quantify the capex difference when liquid cooling is deployed at 20 kW/rack and 40 kW/rack for the same capacity data center. The result is 10% and 14% capex savings, respectively.