On June 5th, China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom jointly released the "White Paper on Liquid Cooling Technology for Telecom Operators", which will carry out technical verification in 2023, scale testing in 2024, and pilot application of liquid cooling technology in 10% of new data centers; By 2025, more than 50% of data center projects will use liquid cooling technology for large-scale applications.

01 | The data center has high energy consumption and a huge liquid cooling market. At this stage, telecom operators mainly adopt two Technology roadmap, namely, cold plate liquid cooling and single-phase immersion liquid cooling. Among them, the cold plate technology is to fix the relevant equipment on the cold plate, and the liquid passes through the cold plate to take away the heat of the equipment. The advantages of cold plate liquid cooling are strong compatibility and easy maintenance. It belongs to indirect contact liquid cooling and is mainly used in standard high-density data centers. And single-phase immersion liquid cooling is to completely immerse the server in the coolant and cool it through the flow of the liquid. The advantages of this method are lower noise and higher efficiency. It belongs to direct contact liquid cooling and is mainly used in ultra-high density data centers. Both of these methods have their own advantages and disadvantages, and their ecosystems still need to be improved. The evolution of both technologies will take time and will coexist for a period of time in the future. Telecom operators will gradually transform from traditional simple users to leaders, designers, and builders of the liquid cooling ecosystem, and integrate upstream and downstream partners to jointly promote the ecological development of the industry. AI drives an increase in demand for data centers/servers. TrendForce Consulting estimates that the annual growth rate of global AI server shipments in 2023 is expected to reach 15.4%, and the compound annual growth rate of AI server shipments from 2023 to 2027 is about 12.2%.

02 | Cold plate liquid cooling has both cost and performance advantages, and has promising application prospects. Cold plate liquid cooling indirectly transfers the heat of the heating device to the cooling liquid enclosed in the circulating pipeline through a cold plate (usually a closed cavity composed of conductive metals such as copper and aluminum), and is a form of implementation that takes away the heat through the cooling liquid, which can reduce the PUE value to around 1.2. According to CCID Consulting, the data market size of China's cold plate data centers is conservatively estimated to exceed 75 billion yuan in 2025, with a CAGR of 22% from 2020 to 2025. According to the circuit structure, it can be divided into primary side systems and secondary side systems. The main components include the cooling distribution unit (CDU), heat exchanger, and liquid cooling plate (LCP), among which the cold plate is a component in direct contact with the liquid in the cooling system and plays an important role in the entire system. In addition, it is worth noting that AI's demand for computing power is growing rapidly, which is far more than the doubling rate of Moore's law in 18 months. The power density of GPU servers used for AI large model training and reasoning will be greatly increased. According to the latest data from IDC, in the second half of 2022, the share of Alibaba Cloud Cloud and Tencent Cloud in the domestic cloud computing market will decline, while the public cloud service business of operators will maintain a rapid growth trend, and the market share will further increase. From the perspective of capital expenditure flow, all three major operators will continue to expand their cloud business. In 2023, China Telecom's computing power (cloud resources) plans to invest 19.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 39.3%; China Unicom's computing power network investment will reach 14.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of over 20%; China Mobile's computing power network plans to invest 45.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 34.9%.

03 Jingtai Viewpoint | Data center temperature control manufacturers, liquid cooled panel manufacturers, and others are expected to benefit. Currently, driven by the demand for AI computing power, server manufacturers such as Inspur Information and ZTE Communications have begun to vigorously layout liquid cooled server products, and the industrialization progress is expected to accelerate. Moreover, in the process of accelerating the penetration of liquid cooling solutions, data center temperature control manufacturers and liquid cooling plate manufacturers are expected to benefit. With the catalysis of AI computing power, A-share Secondary market related listed companies have long been sought after by funds. Mainstream server manufacturers have begun to build standardized production lines for cold plate and liquid cooling servers in 2022. Almost all the leading Internet companies have closely followed the liquid cooling technology, and the large-scale deployment of cold plate and liquid cooling data centers has begun in 2022. Its cold plate liquid cooling technology has made breakthrough progress in the maturity of the industry chain and ecological matching in the computing power industry. Its revenue related to liquid cooling technology from data center computer rooms and computing equipment was about 5 times that of the previous year. With the emergence of new application scenarios such as AI, higher requirements are being placed on computing power devices and data centers that carry computing power. While driving the demand for data centers, with the increase in computing power density, the thermal density of computing power equipment and data center cabinets will significantly increase. The full chain introduction of liquid cooling technology in data center heat dissipation and computing power equipment heat dissipation will accelerate.