Cooling Choices in the AI Era: Dell PowerEdge's Flexible Answer Between Air and Liquid
The IT team's heartbeat rises and falls with data center temperatures, but this year Lao Zhang has stayed calm: the machine room is cool, the patrol found nothing wrong, and it even feels a bit cold. The CFO, Lao Jia, is anything but. Summer pushed temperatures past 40°C, server cooling costs kept climbing, and the cold air is literally money. The company added GPU accelerators for AI, which raised power consumption along with compute. Going full liquid would mean overhauling the data center, and with heart willing but budget unwilling, even the turnkey offerings of a GPU cabinet air liquid CDU manufacturer are out of reach. Staying with air cooling keeps PUE high and costs stuck, a real dilemma.
The right answer between liquid and air is the one that fits. AI has pushed power consumption to unprecedented heights, and NVIDIA's upcoming B100 chip reportedly moves from air cooling to liquid cooling, with all future GPU cooling to follow, making the AI server air liquid cooling CDU the expected backbone of next-generation AI servers. The data center cooling market reached US$7.67 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at an 18.4% CAGR through 2028. Yet adoption is the hard part: full liquid cooling is effective but expensive and poorly compatible, while air-liquid hybrid designs are flexible and easy to try but add infrastructure complexity and cannot fully realize the energy value. So how do you choose?
As AI workloads demand the latest GPUs and CPUs, the heat per rack can exceed what traditional air cooling can handle. To help customers manage data center power, Dell surveyed cooling methods in southern US data centers and customer requirements for recommended solutions, including maximum rack power and maximum facility water temperature, across everything from the air liquid cooling distribution unit that circulates coolant to the racks down to the air-side equipment. The common options: cold plate DLC, where plates contact CPUs and GPUs directly and liquid carries the heat away; RDHx rear door heat exchangers, which use fans at the rack rear to expel hot air; in-row coolers, which sit beside racks like standalone air conditioners; and enclosure systems, which control, cool and recirculate the heated exhaust, usually paired with in-row cooling.
Each technology supports different rack densities and facility water temperatures: DLC plus RDHx reaches the highest rack power at up to 120kW but needs lower water temperature, while DLC plus in-row cooling plus enclosure balances the two, and both beat air-only approaches. For projects that cannot rebuild the whole facility, a rack mounted liquid cooling CDU delivers the same benefits one rack at a time.
On energy, which is what CFO Lao Jia cares about most, IT energy covers everything inside the server including fans, while cooling energy covers everything outside it, from CDUs and CRACs to outdoor air-cooled chillers. For a typical dual-CPU server rack, replacing air cooling with RDHx saves 16% of annual energy, adding DLC brings the saving to 18%, and integrating enclosure with DLC, where higher facility water temperature lets chillers run at lower power, saves 23% versus traditional air cooling and 12% versus DLC alone. Total energy falls with every layer of integration, which is why high density server liquid CDU environments combine cooling paths instead of relying on one.
Liquid cooling architecture is still evolving, and the principle never changes: find the balance between the best power and the best performance, because only then is every cent maximized. Dell integrates diverse cooling options into the server design itself with an open, flexible strategy rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, and this freedom extends to the infrastructure level, where the data center liquid cooling CDU can be sized to the deployment instead of dictated by the server. The PowerEdge XE series for AI and HPC offers air cooling, LAAC liquid-assisted air cooling and DLC direct liquid cooling, so users can pick the right path for natural language processing, large dataset analysis or neural network training.
The PowerEdge XE8640 is a 4U air-cooled platform supporting four 700W GPU modules with NVIDIA NVLink, using LAAC to collect CPU and GPU heat through cold tubes and transfer it to an air-cooled radiator at the rear, supporting ambient temperatures up to 35°C. Dell's internal models show a well-designed hybrid air plus DLC deployment uses only 3% to 4% more cooling energy than full cold plate coverage, and that small premium buys higher flexibility, fewer hoses and connectors with far lower leak risk, and simpler maintenance with hot-swappable components. Whether you work with an AI GPU liquid cooling CDU supplier or build the loop in-house, this is the balance the AI era demands.
The PowerEdge XE9640 is a 2U dual-socket server using full DLC for CPU and GPU cooling, supporting standard PCIe cards and four 700W GPU modules, delivering twice the rack density of the XE8640 in the same footprint while cutting the demand for cold air. The XE9680, Dell's first 8-way rack air-cooled server, applies Dell intelligent cooling for AI-accelerated insights with maximum expansion and real-time performance. As a pioneer of frontier server technology, Dell combines intelligent cooling with the PowerEdge portfolio to lift every rack's compute density and cooling efficiency to a new level, whether the path is pure air, pure liquid, or a high efficiency air liquid cooling CDU bridging both.
To unlock the full potential of these next-gen heterogeneous servers, reliable cross-mode thermal infrastructure including hybrid-mode CDUs is critical for real-world data-center deployments. As AI advances, cooling must evolve. EXTRCOOL delivers a complete liquid-cooling package—CDUs, cold plates, manifolds, and piping—in one streamlined solution. Choose standard products or a custom design tailored to your facility. The outcome: more effective heat dissipation, lower energy costs, and a greener footprint, proven at gigawatt-scale installations globally. When uptime is essential, EXTRCOOL is the dependable partner. Browse our full range or get a personalised quote today: https://www.extrcool.com/
