Advancements and Community Growth in OCP Immersion Cooling

Author: Rolf Brink, Promersion Collection: 2024 OCP Global Summit - Cooling Environments & Immersion

Summary

Rolf Brink, serving as OCP (Open Compute Project) immersion project lead and founder of Promersion, presents a dual-track keynote: first analyzing liquid cooling market dynamics and then unveiling a new governance model for the OCP Immersion Cooling project. The market analysis argues that cold plate cooling has already crossed its inflection point in 2024 — driven by mandatory requirements from NVIDIA and Intel — while immersion cooling is still in organic growth mode but faces a similar forced-adoption event projected around 2028–2029. Brink forecasts that by 2030, 55% of all new IT equipment supplied will use direct liquid cooling (cold plate and immersion combined), with immersion ultimately requiring cold plate integration as system-level thermal loads continue to rise beyond the xPU (processing unit) itself.

The core technical argument is that platform-level thermal challenges — not just CPU/GPU TDP (thermal design power) — are what make immersion inevitable. Memory (DDR: 180–240W per CPU, HBM: 50W/module), network cards (SmartNICs: 75W+/port, InfiniBand: 60W+), storage accelerators (50W), and power delivery losses (VRM: 85–95% efficiency, PSU: 53W per kW total system power) collectively scale alongside GPU power, creating a "system (non-xPU)" thermal curve that tracks xPU growth. Brink projects the air-cooling tipping point at approximately 1.2 kW platform power for the non-xPU components, expected around 2028.

The second half introduces a restructured OCP Immersion project with four technical committees (Fluids, Solutions, IT Equipment, Reliability), five support teams, and 16 active workstreams covering over 600 community members. The project characterizes the current transition as "the largest datacenter transition since the advent of cloud," with only four years to build standards, supply chains, and optimized server designs before forced adoption arrives.