Ebullient Aims to Take Liquid Cooling Beyond the HPC Market

Originally posted on Data Center Frontier by Rich Miller

LAS VEGAS – A data center startup offers a new take on popular approaches to liquid cooling, and is hoping it can build a following beyond the high-performance computing community, which has traditionally been the primary market for liquid cooling solutions.

Ebullient Cooling is cooling processors using Novec 7000, a liquid coolant from 3M that has proven popular in immersion cooling solutions for the bitcoin market. Instead of dunking servers in a bath, Ebullient is delivering the dielectric fluid directly to the processor, using a piping system to bring the liquid inside the server chassis. Several existing liquid cooling vendors use internal loops to bring fluid to the chip, but use water as the coolant.

“There’s still a lot of discomfort with water in the data center industry,” said Tim Shedd, the Chief Executive Officer of Ebullient Cooling. “I was motivated to do this with a dielectric fluid that wouldn’t damage the equipment (in the event of a leak).”

Shedd isn’t bashful of demonstrating the leak-proof nature of the Novec fluid. Standing next to his demo rack on the expo floor at the recent Data Center World Global conference, Shedd opens a bottle containing Novec and pours it out onto his mobile phone. It evaporates in seconds.

To read the full article, view it on the Data Center Frontier website here.