Microsoft to run two-phase immersion cooling in its data center in Quincy, WA. Two-phase immersion cooling involves submerging electronic components into a bath of dielectric heat-transfer liquid. Unlike water, the fluid inside the tank is harmless to electronic equipment and engineered to boil at 50ºC. The low-temperature boil enables the servers to operate continuously at full power without the risk of failure due to overheating.
Inside the tank, the vapor rising from the boiling fluid contacts a cooled condenser in the tank lid. The condenser coils are connected to a separate closed-loop system that uses fluid to transfer heat from the tank to a dry cooler outside the tank’s container. Microsoft investigated liquid immersion as a cooling solution for high-performance computing applications such as AI. Among other things, the investigation revealed that two-phase immersion cooling reduced power consumption for any given server by 5% to 15%.
The findings motivated the Microsoft team to work with Wiwynn, a data center IT system manufacturer and designer, to develop a two-phase immersion cooling solution.
Christian Belady, Vice President of Microsoft’s data center advanced development group in Redmond, said: “Air cooling is not enough. That’s what’s driving us to immersion cooling, where we can directly boil off the surfaces of the chip.”
Ioannis Manousakis, Principal Software Engineer with Microsoft Azure, said: “If done right, two-phase immersion cooling will attain all our cost, reliability and performance requirements simultaneously with essentially a fraction of the energy spend compared to air cooling.”
