Immersion Cooling: Progress, Trends, and Industry Growth

Author: Rolf Brink, CEO Promersion, Project Co-chair CE-Immersion (alongside co-chair Jessica Gullbrand, Intel) Collection: 2025-OCP-EMEA-Summit-Immersion-Cooling

Summary

This keynote-style presentation opened the OCP EMEA 2025 immersion cooling track, delivered by Rolf Brink (Promersion), who serves as OCP CE-Immersion Project Co-chair alongside Jessica Gullbrand of Intel. Brink presented a comprehensive market analysis covering the technology inflection dynamics, IT equipment evolution through 2030, liquid cooling market sizing, and OCP immersion project governance and community growth.

The central argument is that liquid cooling has crossed a necessity-driven inflection point — not a choice-driven one. In 2024, GPU and CPU TDPs crossed the threshold where air cooling is physically disabled, triggering the cold plate adoption wave. Immersion is a parallel technology on the same trajectory, with its inflection point projected for approximately 2028, when non-CPU/GPU platform components (NICs, memory, storage, PSUs) collectively exceed 1 kW of non-localizable heat load, making distributed-heat immersion superior to point-cooling cold plates. The 5-year CAGR forecast for immersion is 71% (2024–2030), versus 47% for cold plate.

Market sizing as of presentation: cold plate ~$6B, immersion ~$0.5B. Five-year forecast reaches ~$25B combined by 2030. Cold plate is expected to plateau in 2030 as it becomes integrated into thermal packaging rather than sold as standalone infrastructure. The presentation introduced OCP's three-phase roadmap to 2030: Phase 1 Standardization (2025–2026), Phase 2 Industrialization (2027–2028), Phase 3 Large-Scale Deployment (2029–2030). The OCP Immersion Project has grown from inception as "Advanced Cooling Solutions" in 2018 to nearly 1,000 members (953 unique participants as of April 2025), with 15 active parallel workstreams, 4 technical committees (Fluids, ITE, Solutions, Reliability), and 34 volunteer leads.