We do not know what chips will look like in a decade.. Perhaps they will use novel architectures that dramatically reduce power consumption, or light-based systems, or even wetware modeled after the human brain.. This feature appeared in our latest cooling supplement.
Read it for free today.. – CoolIT. More likely, however, is that Nvidia and its rivals will continue to pump more power into their chips to eke out better performance. Thermal Design Power (TDP) will rise further and further, pushing systems to their limit, while the chips themselves will get larger..
For those designing data centers today, picking a cooling architecture that can scale to unknown limits is a fraught affair. But researchers at CoolIT have sought to reassure the market that single-phase will be able to keep up.. “As a whole, TDP is increasing, so should the customers that are investing heavily in single-phase be concerned?” CTO Kamal Mostafavi asks. “Should they be thinking about pivoting to maybe invest in a different direction in the next few years?”.
Mostafavi recalls the past few years of chip TDP growth. “There was this misperception in the industry. Five years ago, people said ‘after 1kW single phase cannot manage it,’ then it changed to 1.5kW, then 2kW, then 2.5kW. We just wanted to stop the conversation and ‘the TDP is not really the problem here.'”.
The result is a coldplate capable of cooling hypothetical 15kW chips. “10 years ago, we were cooling chips that were about 100-150W, now they are 10 times more. We wanted to see if it goes another 10 years, and packaging is a bigger size with the same heat flux, then at that point you still want to make sure that cooling is not a bottleneck.”.
The plate is larger than CoolIT’s commercial hardware, with the company predicting bigger chips – or at least clusters of chips on the same packaging. “Nvidia did this with Blackwell, where they have two GPUs interconnected together, so the question is how many of these GPUs, CPUs, or brains do you want to be interconnected through packaging?”. Another unknown is heat flux, the rate at which heat energy is transferred through a given surface area.
Essentially, while a chip TDP might increase, if its actual physical area has proportionally grown, then the heat flux may be the same.. “The expectation from the market two years ago was that, with the level that TDP is increasing, the heat flux is going to increase,” Mostafavi says. “It did not happen due to the challenges that people faced from the packaging perspective.. “We understand that the packet might have some warpage, depending on the material selection, the yield rate, and other things. Heat flux will probably plateau around where things are today, but with more [on the package] that are gonna get connected.
That is what we are observing right now, and that is why heat flux hasn’t been skyrocketing. However, from our technology roadmap perspective, we just don’t want to make assumptions in that.”. The 15kW coldplate does make that assumption; it is designed to the same heat flux envelope of today’s hardware..
“Nvidia Rubin is 160-170 per square centimeter,” Mostafavi says. “Say tomorrow they make Ruben Ultra, 400-500W, what is our solution as a cooling vendor for that? That’s the problem we are solving currently..
“We’re working on solutions for that, we’re gonna make more announcements around this in the future. That’s my messaging for the market, I’m not concerned about TDP. Forget about TDP.”.
The 15kW coldplate, and future heat flux-focused announcements, are not expected to be sold at scale. They exist as a way to reassure the market that spiraling TDPs are not a death knell to the current single-phase approach.. “Hyperscalers, colos, and OEMs are all asking, ‘if I’m building a brand new data center, by the time I finish it, do I need to rip it apart and build something different?’” Mostafavi says..
“That’s a billion-dollar question. At least from a cooling perspective, I can say ‘we got you, don’t worry about it’.”. More in Cooling.
03 Sep 2026. More in North America. 07 May 2026.
26 May 2026
