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

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.