Liquid-Cooled Bus Bar

Overview

Liquid-cooled bus bars replace the copper conductors in traditional rack power distribution with a hybrid structure that integrates coolant flow channels alongside or around the electrical conductors. By conducting heat away from the bus bar directly via liquid rather than air convection, these components support five times the current capacity in the same physical form factor compared to air-cooled bus bars. Air-cooled bus bars reach their thermal ceiling at approximately 200kW of rack power; liquid-cooled configurations from TE Connectivity support 200kW to 750kW, with a 1.2MW configuration in development as of 2025.

TE Connectivity claims to be first-to-market with a production liquid-cooled bus bar. Meta was identified as an early production deployer. The bus bars are designed for compatibility with OCP ORv3 and ORv3-HPR rack specifications, enabling drop-in adoption within OCP-standard rack ecosystems. The technology is critical to the industry's rack power scaling trajectory: from ~100kW today toward 1MW, which air-cooled power distribution cannot support.