Energy simulation-driven approach to energy efficiency: case study on liquid immersion cooling in a hyperscale data centre in tropical climate

Air cooling systems face challenges in meeting the rising power demands of modern workloads, especially over 100 kW per rack, due to AI advancements. This is especially true in tropical climates with high humidity and temperature. Some data centre owners hesitate to adopt Liquid Immersion Cooling (LIC) as an innovative solution due to insufficient information about the real implementation for long-term effects, especially on its reliability to cool the server.

This paper highlights how building simulation demonstrates the energy performance of LIC and air cooling systems. Results show that LIC has a 57.0% reduction in the cooling system energy consumption, lowers Power Usage Effectiveness 2 (PUE2) to 1.16, and reduces carbon emissions from operational electricity consumption (server room cooling system) by 458,868 kgCO₂e/year/MW IT load, making it a powerful tool for decision-making.