Cooling Environments: Industry Analytics, Project Progress and Cold Plate Developments

Author: Steve Mills, Mechanical Engineer and Technical Lead, Meta; Rolf Brink, CEO, Promersion Collection: 2026-OCP-EMEA-Summit-Cooling-Environments-And-Liquid-Cooling

Summary

This opening keynote for the OCP EMEA Summit 2026 Cooling Environments track (Barcelona, April 29–30) covers two major segments: (1) Promersion's industry analytics on the global data center and liquid cooling market trajectory, and (2) a structured status update from Meta's Steve Mills on the five subprojects within the OCP Cooling Environments project — Door Heat Exchanger, Heat Reuse, Immersion, CDU, and Cold Plate. Rolf Brink presents proprietary Promersion market data showing that the global data center market is on a CAGR of ~15% through 2035, that liquid cooling grew 484% in 2024 driven by Nvidia Blackwell deployments, and that immersion cooling will become a requirement at the next inflection point around 2028 as chassis-level TDP from all components — not just GPUs — becomes too distributed for direct-to-chip alone. The presentation argues that the industry needs a diverse toolkit of cooling technologies (single-phase cold plate, two-phase cold plate, single-phase immersion, two-phase immersion, microfluidics) that are application-specific rather than competing head-to-head.

The second segment covers the current status of the five OCP Cooling Environments subprojects. Cold plate is the most active, with recent approved specifications including the Pivoting Blind Mate Coupling (PBMC) and rope leak sensor base specification, plus three contributions in process: water-based coolant base spec, PG25 base spec, and Universal Quick Disconnect (UQD) V2. The CDU subproject just completed its first contribution — Project Deschutes 1.0 — contributed by Google. The Immersion subproject has four recent approved contributions including power distribution in the immersion base specification and safe handling guidelines. The Cooling Environments community has grown to 490 members at the umbrella level, with CE-Immersion at 1,409 members, CE-Cold Plate at 752, and CE-DoorHX at 321.