Beyond the Liquid Cooling Hype: Why Airflow Still Matters in AI Data Centers

AI-driven liquid cooling adoption will create hybrid facilities, not eliminate air cooling, which still removes 20-30% of thermal load.

• Hybrid, not either/or: Even in liquid-cooled AI data centers, 70-80% of IT thermal load still exits via air, per ebm-papst's Brooke Zalud, leaving 20-30% as leakage/residual heat.
• Density threshold: Liquid cooling is generally tied to AI/HPC racks around 100 kilowatts and higher; lower-latency workloads (cloud storage, email) remain air-cooled.

Themes, sentiment and reasons are AI-written paraphrases, checked so they never quote an episode. They may contain errors. Not investment advice. Episodes remain the property of their creators.