Guojin Securities: AI server cooling enters the liquid cooling era, demand for heat transfer materials is prominent

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Guojin Securities released a research report saying that the Nvidia (NVDA.US) GB300 server uses a fully liquid-cooled rack design, leading the new trend of AI server liquid cooling; the demand for liquid cooling and cooling of AI servers may increase rapidly along with the increase in AI server shipments. There are many existing liquid cooling solutions, mainly including cold plate type, immersion type and spray type. High-efficiency liquid cooling solutions are highly dependent on fluorinated liquid materials. Liquid cooling solutions will be the mainstream cooling method for AI servers in the future. It is recommended to focus on leading domestic companies that use cold plate and submersible liquid for upstream raw materials such as fluorine refrigerants and electronic fluorinated liquids; and companies related to liquid metals with high-efficiency TIM materials.

Guojin Securities's main views are as follows:

Nvidia GB300 NVL72 server computing power was further improved, and demand for liquid cooling increased rapidly

Nvidia is about to release its AI server NVIDIADGXGB300 NVL72 this year. The AI computing power has been further improved, and the inference performance is 1.5 times higher than the DGXGB200. High chip computing power consumption (TDP) has been further improved. Traditional air cooling technology has low thermal conductivity, making it difficult to meet the high TDP cooling requirements. The GB300 server uses a completely liquid-cooled rack design, leading the new trend of AI server liquid cooling. Demand for liquid cooling and cooling of AI servers may increase rapidly along with the increase in AI server shipments.

There are many existing liquid cooling solutions, mainly including cold plate type, immersion type and spray type. High-efficiency liquid cooling solutions are highly dependent on fluorinated liquid materials

According to whether the coolant is in direct contact with the electronic device, liquid cooling can be divided into indirect liquid cooling and direct liquid cooling; according to whether a phase transition process of liquid phase to gas phase occurs during coolant operation, it can be divided into single-phase liquid cooling and two-phase liquid cooling. Among them, the current mainstream form of indirect liquid cooling is single-phase/two-phase cold plate liquid cooling. Direct liquid cooling is mainly single-phase/two-phase immersion liquid cooling and single/two-phase spray liquid cooling. Among these liquid cooling solutions, cold plate technology is more mature and widely used, but the upper limit of cooling effect is low; immersion and spray liquid cooling have excellent cooling effects, but the economic cost is high, and the material requirements are high: due to direct contact between the coolant and electronic devices, the stability and insulation requirements of the coolant are extremely high. Currently, the materials that meet all needs and are suitable for use as coolants are mainly fluorinated liquid materials.

AI server shipments are driving a rapid increase in demand for electronic fluorinated liquids, and the withdrawal of the faucet brings new structural opportunities

Electronic fluorinated liquid is a general term for a series of perfluorocarbons, such as perfluorohexane, perfluorobutane, hydrofluoride compounds, perfluorocarbons, etc. These materials have excellent properties such as high insulation, non-flammability, low toxicity and non-corrosive properties, thermal stability and good chemical stability. At the same time, the boiling point can be adjusted according to the proportion of different components. Therefore, mixtures such as electronic fluorofluoride have a wide range of operating temperatures and can be applied to a variety of different heat dissipation scenarios and single-phase and two-phase requirements. The bank predicts that in 2025/2026, with the increase in AI server shipments, the demand for corresponding fluorinated liquid will reach 122,000 tons and 256,000 tons, an increase of 150% and 110% over the previous year. The global fluorinated liquid industry is concentrated, and the top five manufacturers account for 80% of the global share; the complete withdrawal of leading 3M companies will bring greater structural opportunities to domestic fluorinated liquid manufacturers.

Combined with high-efficiency TIM material liquid metal, the two-phase cold plate heat dissipation scheme has obvious advantages

The advantages of cold plate liquid cooling are that the technology is mature, the cost is low, and there are many types of coolants to choose from; although the cooling effect is not as good as immersion and spray type, if used with phase change metal sheets (liquid metals indium and gallium) with high thermal conductivity in thermal interface materials (TIM materials), the heat dissipation performance of cold plate liquid cooling can be greatly improved, making the comprehensive advantages of cold plate liquid cooling very obvious. The liquid metal TIM material is perfectly compatible with the thermal conductivity requirements of GPUs and CPUs, and can be used for both cold plate and immersion liquid cooling. It is the most ideal heat transfer material for current high-end chips. It can be used with almost all heat dissipation methods and materials, and is also one of the mainstream chip heat transfer materials in the future.

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