Data Center Cooling: Trends and Strategies to Watch in 2025

As the new year unfolds, data center operators are set to leverage a variety of new cooling technologies and techniques. Some are mature and proven solutions, while others remain more experimental. But they’re all likely to help shape data center cooling trends in 2025 as businesses look for more cost-effective and sustainable ways to cool their facilities.

To preview what’s next in the world of data center cooling, here’s a look at six key trends to watch in the new year.

1. Rising Data Center Heat Challenges

Perhaps the most important data center cooling trend that will impact the sector in 2025 is increased demand on cooling systems. This is due especially to ongoing deployment of AI workloads, which tend to generate more heat than traditional applications.

The result is that in 2025 and beyond, finding ways to improve data center cooling won’t simply be about saving money or reducing carbon emissions. It will also become critical for ensuring that facilities can accommodate AI without overheating.

2. Increased Adoption of Liquid Cooling

One way to dissipate heat more effectively is to replace traditional air coolers with liquid cooling systems. These may include immersion cooling, which covers equipment in non-conductive liquid, an extremely efficient – but costly – cooling method, and direct-to-chip cooling, which transfers heat directly from chips.

Related:Top 10 Data Center Power and Cooling Stories of 2024

Liquid cooling systems are generally much more expensive than traditional cooling solutions, and they can be difficult to retrofit into existing facilities. But according to IDC, 22% of data centers already have liquid cooling systems in place. Expect that figure to grow in the new year as data center operators respond to contend with the added heat load of AI – and as data centers leverage new innovations designed to make liquid cooling more efficient and reliable, such as a novel propylene glycol-based direct-to-chip cooling fluid recently unveiled by Castor.

3. Low-Cost Cooling System Improvements

Another way to improve the effectiveness of data center cooling is to optimize the chilled-air systems that many facilities already have in place. Simple, inexpensive improvements like optimizing the positioning of fans, or sealing off space that doesn’t need to be cooled to avoid blowing air into it, can deliver important boosts in cooling system capabilities.

Measures like these won’t typically result in triple-digit improvements in performance, but they may boost cooling capacity by 10-20% – which could be enough to allow facilities to support heat-intensive AI workloads without requiring brand-new cooling systems. That’s why we expect these types of improvements to become another data center cooling trend in the new year.

Related:Heat Reuse Strategies for Liquid-Cooled Data Centers

4. Creative Heat Reuse Strategies

In addition to the need to dissipate greater amounts of heat, part of the pressure that data center operators face on the cooling front at present centers on sustainability. To reduce overall carbon emissions, facilities need to reduce the amount of energy they waste through heat dissipation.

Newer, more efficient cooling technologies (such as liquid cooling, which we mentioned above) are one way to do this. But another strategy is simply to repurpose the heat that cooling systems pump out of data centers. Communities can reuse heat in homes, for example – or, in a more creative vein, they can heat swimming pools or grow plants.

Heat reuse practices like these are already underway. Expect to see more of them in 2025 as businesses continue to focus on data center sustainability.

5. Cooling System Analytics

If you want to optimize your data center cooling system, you must first identify its weaknesses. This is where cooling system sensors and data analytics come in. By collecting and analyzing data such as the temperature within various parts of a data center, operators can determine which equipment is running hotter than it should. They can also find instances where cooling systems are removing more heat than necessary, which could be a sign of wasted cooling capacity and energy.

Related:Free Cooling for Data Centers: Strategies and Advantages

Sensor-based temperature monitoring and analytics in data centers is not a new practice. However, advancements in AI technology have made it easier than ever to process this data and identify optimization opportunities based on it. For that reason, we’ll likely see more and more investment in this cooling system analytics in 2025.

Read more of the latest data center cooling news and analysis

6. Higher Target Temperatures in Data Centers

Traditionally, data center operators have aimed to keep server room temperatures in the low-70 degrees Fahrenheit or below. But some data center companies, such as Equinix, have begun experimenting with somewhat higher temperatures in their server rooms, and they’re reporting success. By increasing target temperatures to the higher 70s, they can reduce the load on cooling systems without experiencing overheating events for IT equipment.

While it’s important to ensure that servers can tolerate higher temperatures before adopting this practice, this is another low-cost way to improve cooling capacity and reduce energy use, which is why I suspect we’ll see more data center operators adopting this tactic in the new year.