When it comes to liquid and immersion cooling, Nvidia asks: Why not both?

Nvidia's vision for datacenter cooling asks the question: given the choice between liquid and immersion cooling, why should you have to choose?

This concept, which involves a combination of direct liquid cooling (DLC) to the silicon and immersion cooling for the rest of the components, is the subject of a $5 million grant from the US Department of Energy (DoE) under its COOLERCHIPS program. The program aims to reduce the amount of power expended on datacenter cooling to less than 5 percent of the energy expended on IT itself.

Nvidia's server cooling concept bears little resemblance to the tank-style immersion cooling setups we've seen from the likes of Submer or LiquidStack. It retains the standard rack-mount form factor used in most air and direct liquid-cooled chassis.

At first blush, the concept looks a lot like one from another immersion cooling vendor: Iceotope. We looked at Iceotope's ...