SPRY356 October   2026 ADS7142 , DRV8426

 

  1.   1
  2.   en-us Overview
  3.   At a glance
  4.   Introduction
  5.   Comparing today's thermal management architectures
    1.     Air-to-air
    2.     Air-to-liquid
    3.     Liquid-to-air
  6.   Evolution of liquid cooling technology
  7.   The need for leak sensing
  8.   Immersion cooling
  9.   Future AI data center cooling trends
  10.   Conclusion
  11.   About the author
  12.   Additional resources
  13.   Trademarks

Comparing today's thermal management architectures

While liquid cooling represents the future of thermal management, mixed technologies will continue to serve the industry for years. Engineers typically reserve the most advanced liquid cooling systems for racks dedicated to AI computing, while other architectures handle standard workloads.

There are three main air-based cooling architectures in data centers, listed here in order of increasing rack power density capability. Each architecture describes the medium used to absorb heat generated in the compute rack, followed by the medium used to transfer heat out of the data center.