Nidec to increase water cooling production

JAPAN: Nidec is to increase production of its coolant distribution unit (CDU) production line in Thailand from 200 to 2,000 units per month by June 2024.

The increase in production of water-cooling modules for servers is in response to their adoption by Supermicro, an American AI server manufacturer. The 100kW to 250kW products, jointly developed with Supermicro, will be manufactured at the Ayutthaya plant.

While fan-based air cooling has been the predominant technology for computing servers in data centres, the growth of AI and the semiconductor-based arithmetic units (CPUs and GPUs) that utilise AI to process learning information with big data generate significantly more heat than their predecessors. According to Nidec, this extra cooling requirement is best achieved by water-cooling systems.

With the water-cooling module market forecast to continue its growth, Nidec intends to expand its monthly CDU production capacity to more than 3,000 units in the future, while expecting the size of related products’ markets to be JPY10bn ($65m) in FY2023, and more than JPY80bn ($520m) in FY2024.

Nidec’s cooling systems employ a liquid-to-liquid method, where cooling modules installed in each server supply cooling water via metal pipes to directly cool each server’s computing devices.