[News] NVIDIA’s Rubin Ultra Seen Driving Immersion Cooling Boom by 2027-28

As AI chips grow more powerful, they generate massive heat that threatens system stability and performance, making advanced cooling the critical bottleneck for cloud giants’ data centers and NVIDIA alike. While liquid cooling dominates today, NVIDIA is expected to embrace immersion cooling post-Rubin Ultra, with the market set to take off between 2027-2028, ZDNet reports.

The report notes that in the early 1970s, companies like IBM experimented with immersion cooling for mainframes and supercomputers, but high costs and maintenance issues prevented commercialization. Decades later, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba began testing two-phase immersion cooling in the mid-2010s, where the coolant vaporizes to remove heat—marking the first step toward commercial adoption, the report adds.

The immersion cooling market is still in its infancy, and industry insiders cited by ZDNet point to NVIDIA as a key reason for the slow growth. While NVIDIA adopts liquid cooling, it does not offer lifespan certification for immersion cooling on their GPUs, which further hinders the adoption, the report notes.

NVIDIA’s Consideration

NVIDIA’s cautious stance may not be the only reason, as economic factors have also slowed the adoption of immersion cooling. According to ZDNet, fully submerging servers requires dedicated infrastructure and cannot use existing air-cooled data center setups, the report notes.

By contrast, liquid cooling can be added via cold plates to current air-cooled systems, letting data centers leverage their existing infrastructure, as per ZDNet.

However, NVIDIA may not be far behind. Sources cited by ZDNet say the immersion cooling market is set to take off between 2027 and 2028, with broader adoption expected after the launch of NVIDIA’s next-gen GPU, “Rubin Ultra,” scheduled for 2027.

According to the report, liquid cooling has slightly lower heat dissipation capability than immersion cooling. While it may be sufficient for now, future chips will inevitably require immersion cooling.

Intel: Unexpected New Entrant?

It is interesting to note that Intel is also eyeing the immersion cooling market. As per its press release in May, the company stated that for now, the adoption and proliferation of liquid immersion cooling, known for its superior performance, has been hindered by a lack of certified immersion solutions that are proven and readily deployable.

Thus, in partnership with Shell Global Solutions, Intel tackles this challenge by validating a full immersion solution for data centers using hardware from Supermicro and Submer. The Intel Data Center Certified for Immersion Cooling is the first solution of its kind for 4th and 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, setting a new standard for cooling efficiency and long-term performance, according to the company.

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(Photo credit: NVIDIA)