Current status of China’s submersible coolant market and status of major companies in 2022

With the continuous and rapid development of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, Internet of Things and other industries, the growing market demand has caused the data center market to grow rapidly. At the same time, the digital economy is a national strategy, and the development of the digital economy provides impetus for the development of China’s data centers.

The continuous and rapid development of computing power has also brought huge energy consumption. In 2020, the electricity consumption of domestic data centers has exceeded 200 billion kilowatt hours, accounting for 2.7% of the total electricity consumption. In the context of China’s dual-carbon strategy, the problem of data center energy consumption has become an urgent need to be solved. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology proposed in the “Three-Year Action Plan for the Development of New Data Centers (2021-2023)” that the PUE of newly built large-scale and above data centers will be reduced to Below 1.35, it will be below 1.3 by 2023. The energy consumption of the cooling system accounts for about 40% of the energy consumption of the data center. The cooling methods mainly include natural cooling, air cooling and water cooling. The water cooling methods include cold plate type, spray type and immersion type. Immersion liquid cooling refers to the Heat-generating electronic components such as CPUs, motherboards, memory sticks, hard drives, etc. are directly immersed in insulating, chemically inert coolant, and the heat generated by the electronic components is taken away by the circulating coolant. Immersion liquid cooling has the highest heat transfer efficiency and can avoid local hot spots. It is currently the most likely technical means to solve various problems faced by cooling systems in high-performance computing environments.

Immersion coolant is one of the most important components of immersion liquid cooling technology. The immersion coolant that attracts the most attention is mainly divided into hydrocarbons, organic silicon compounds and fluorocarbons, such as mineral oil, synthetic oil, Silicone oil, electronic fluorinated fluid, etc. In addition to the data center field, immersion coolant can also be used to cool transformers and electric vehicle batteries.

Based on whether the coolant undergoes phase change, immersion liquid cooling can be divided into single-phase immersion liquid cooling and dual-phase immersion liquid cooling. Single-phase immersion liquid cooling has a wide range of coolants, including hydrocarbons, organic silicon compounds and fluorocarbons. The coolant for dual-phase immersion liquid cooling generally uses fluorocarbons. Currently, single-phase immersion liquid cooling technology accounts for a large proportion of immersion liquid cooling technologies.

The “2022-2026 In-depth Market Research and Investment Strategy Suggestions Report on the Immersed Coolant Industry compiled and released by the Industrial Research Center shows that, Immersion coolant companies in the Chinese market mainly include 3M (3M™ Fluorinert™ electronic fluorinated fluid and 3M™ Novec™ electronic fluorinated fluid), Dow Company (DOWSIL™) ICL-1000 data center immersed coolant Coolant), Juhua Co., Ltd. (Juxin Coolant), Noah Fluorine Chemicals, etc. Currently, Juhua Co., Ltd.’s 5,000 tons/year Juxin Coolant (Phase 1, 1,000 tons/year) is under construction. The product is suitable for cooling media required for heat exchange in big data centers, as well as cutting-edge industries and electronic fluids.

With the advancement of commercialization of immersed liquid cooling technology, the immersed coolant market also has large room for development, and the market size of the industry is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years.