2025 Liquid Cooling in Data Centers Report: AI Trends, Top Company Strategies & Market Analysis

Industry Activity Overview

The following charts provide a comprehensive view of media signals and commercial activities across all companies in the Liquid Cooling in Data Centers sector.

Liquid Cooling in Data Centers Industry Analysis 2025: Comprehensive Company Overview

This comprehensive analysis examines the leading companies in the Liquid Cooling in Data Centers sector, providing detailed insights into their strategies, technologies, and market activities throughout 2023-2025.

Google Liquid Cooling & Immersion Cooling: AI Future 2025 →

Over the 2023-2025 period, Google has solidified its leadership in sustainable AI infrastructure through a vertically integrated strategy centered on proprietary hardware and energy efficiency. The company demonstrated a dynamic innovation cycle, launching its Cloud TPU v5p in 2023 and Ironwood TPU in 2025 to power its AI Hypercomputer and Gemini models. Strategic partnerships were crucial, including an expanded collaboration with NVIDIA and a deal with Danfoss for advanced cooling and heat reuse. Key milestones included securing a 434-megawatt renewable PPA with Salt River Project in 2024 and deploying advanced liquid cooling technologies like the Project Deschutes Coolant Distribution Unit. This culminated in a significant commercial victory in August 2025 with a landmark cloud deal valued at over $10 billion with Meta Platforms Inc. Despite this success, the company’s market activity shows a trend of navigating challenges, including a 2024 patent lawsuit and growing reputational risks tied to resource consumption, indicating that managing ESG narratives is an emerging strategic priority.

Azure’s 2025 Liquid & Immersion Cooling Tech Analysis →

Microsoft Azure has decisively cemented its leadership in sustainable AI infrastructure across the 2023-2025 period, executing a strategic pivot towards vertical integration to manage the intense power and thermal demands of next-generation AI. This strategy progressed from foundational R&D to large-scale deployment, marked by the late 2023 launch of its custom Azure Maia 100 AI accelerator and innovations in direct-to-chip liquid cooling. A key breakthrough occurred in 2025 with a novel, AI-designed microfluidics cooling system developed with Corintis, culminating in the Q4 2025 deployment of the world’s first NVIDIA GB300 supercomputing cluster for its partner OpenAI. This aggressive roadmap was backed by substantial capital, including a fiscal year 2025 commitment of $80 billion for AI data centers and a $3.2 billion expansion in Sweden. Azure’s market activity surged in the final quarter of each year, successfully narrowing the gap between ambitious announcements and tangible deployments, solidifying market confidence in its ability to deliver energy-efficient, high-performance computing globally.

AWS Liquid & Immersion Cooling: AI Strategy 2025 →

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has decisively positioned itself as a market-shaping innovator in sustainable data center infrastructure between 2023 and 2025, driven by the immense energy demands of Artificial Intelligence. The company’s strategic evolution is marked by high-impact milestones, beginning with its 2023 partnership with Nvidia on the liquid-cooled “Ceiba” supercomputer and a $650 million acquisition of a nuclear-powered data center campus in 2024. The year 2025 proved pivotal with the commercial launch of its proprietary In-Row Heat Exchanger (IRHX) liquid cooling system, promising up to a 46% reduction in mechanical energy use, and a landmark $20 billion commitment to develop nuclear-powered data centers in Pennsylvania. This aggressive “heavy-hitter” strategy of vertical integration, backed by a $100 billion expansion plan also revealed in 2025, has disrupted the market by pressuring established vendors like Vertiv while fostering a new ecosystem of specialized suppliers such as XYRA Corp. This concerted push into proprietary cooling and carbon-free nuclear energy solidifies AWS’s ambition to dominate the AI computing era with a significant performance and sustainability advantage.

Meta’s 2025 Liquid & Immersion Cooling Strategy Revealed →

Meta Platforms has solidified its position as a market-defining force in sustainable AI infrastructure across 2023-2025, moving from a strategic recalibration to aggressive, large-scale deployment. After a pause in 2023 that included a $3 billion capital expenditure reduction, the company surged forward with an announced $65 billion global AI data center expansion plan in 2025. This growth is materializing through landmark projects, including a $1.5 billion facility in El Paso and an $800 million data center in Indiana. Central to Meta‘s strategy is its leadership in high-efficiency liquid cooling, driving toward a corporate goal of becoming water positive by 2030. The company actively fosters ecosystem alignment through the Open Compute Project (OCP), developing open standards like the Open Rack Wide (ORW) form factor. Strategic partnerships with technology leaders such as NVIDIA for its GB200 solutions and AMD are critical to this expansion, signaling a decisive market shift from planning to tangible, hyper-scale execution of next-generation, sustainable AI infrastructure.

Oracle’s 2025 AI: Liquid & Immersion Cooling Strategy →

Oracle has aggressively pivoted from a period of strategic positioning in 2023 to one of landmark commercial execution, establishing itself as a critical infrastructure provider for the energy-intensive AI sector. This transformation is driven by its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) platform, which leverages advanced liquid cooling solutions through a key partnership with NVIDIA to power next-generation hardware. The company’s market activity is defined by unprecedented scale, highlighted by a $30 billion deal to supply 4.5GW of data center power for OpenAI’s Stargate project and its 2024 announcement to build the world’s first Zettascale Cloud Computing Cluster. This ambitious roadmap is supported by a planned $100 billion investment in its data center business, including a $6.5 billion expansion in Malaysia and a multi-cloud agreement with Google Cloud. As Oracle moves into its execution phase through 2025, its primary challenge shifts to delivering on this massive pipeline while navigating the narrative conflict created by its reliance on a 2.3GW natural gas agreement, which tempers its clean technology efficiency credentials and poses a future reputational risk.

Digital Realty Liquid & Immersion Cooling 2025 Analysis →

Digital Realty has strategically repositioned itself as a global leader in high-density data center infrastructure, aggressively targeting the burgeoning AI and HPC markets between 2023 and 2025. This pivot was decisively validated in Q4 2023 through a landmark $7 billion joint venture with Blackstone to develop multiple AI-focused hyperscale facilities. Key expansion projects underscore this strategy, including the 2025 announcement of a planned $2 billion UK mega-campus and the 2024 launch of the NRT12 data center in Japan through its MC Digital Realty venture. Technologically, the company is commercializing advanced cooling solutions like Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC) to support extreme power densities up to 150 kW per rack, launching its Digital Realty Innovation Lab (DRIL) in September 2025 to accelerate market adoption. While securing key AI clients like Preferred Networks, a notable trend has emerged: a growing gap between its high volume of strategic announcements and a lower frequency of tangible commercial deals, suggesting a strategy of establishing strong market leadership while navigating the complex, long-term sales cycles for its next-generation, AI-ready infrastructure.

CoreWeave 2025: Liquid & Immersion Cooling Deep Dive →

CoreWeave has rapidly cemented its position as a premier specialized cloud provider, capitalizing on the generative AI boom by offering purpose-built infrastructure for high-performance computing. Following a pivotal funding round in 2023, the company executed a massive GPU cloud deployment and a significant data center expansion across the United States and Europe through 2024. This growth was underpinned by a deep strategic partnership with NVIDIA, granting CoreWeave priority access to the latest-generation GPUs, including the H100 and B200 models. By its 2025 target, the company’s focus has evolved toward advanced innovation, primarily through the development of its Data Center-as-a-Code (DAC) solutions. While successfully securing a blue-chip enterprise client base and competing effectively against hyperscalers like AWS and GCP, CoreWeave is also diversifying by expanding into the enterprise AI inference market and developing sovereign cloud capabilities for government clients, marking a clear trend of increasing market presence and service portfolio expansion.

Equinix Liquid & Immersion Cooling: AI Strategy 2025 →

As a leading data center operator, Equinix has strategically positioned itself as a critical infrastructure provider for the AI era, executing a multi-year strategy between 2023-2025 focused on high-density power and cooling. The company’s market activity followed a clear pattern, moving from foundational partnerships in 2023 with technology giants like NVIDIA and AWS to a period of significant capital investment in 2024, totaling over $600 million for new AI-ready facilities in Asia and Australia. Key projects included the US$260 million SG6 data center in Singapore and the $124 million HK6 facility in Hong Kong. This groundwork culminated in a breakthrough Q3 2025, marked by a surge in commercial deployments that validated its focus on advanced direct-to-chip and two-phase liquid cooling technologies. Having successfully moved this technology from pilots with partners like Dell to live commercial applications, Equinix is now aggressively expanding its proven capabilities into key international markets, with plans to support liquid cooling in over 100 data centers globally to capture a dominant market share.

Aligned Data Centers: Liquid & Immersion Cooling 2025 →

Aligned Data Centers has strategically positioned itself as a critical enabler of the AI revolution, capitalizing on the unprecedented demand for high-density infrastructure. Throughout 2023, the company focused on refining its build-to-scale model and green innovations, setting the stage for a pivotal shift in 2024 toward deploying its advanced Direct-to-Chip (DAC) liquid cooling solutions for hyperscale AI clients. This technological leadership has allowed the firm to move from a market challenger to an established leader, securing significant contracts with major cloud providers and cementing its role within the AI ecosystem. Looking ahead to its 2025 target, Aligned is executing a robust project pipeline and pursuing a strategic global expansion into European and APAC markets to diversify its historically North American footprint. While poised for significant growth, its future success now hinges on navigating critical infrastructure bottlenecks, including power availability shortages and global supply chain disruptions, which have replaced direct competition as its primary challenges.

Applied Digital: Liquid & Immersion Cooling in 2025 →

Applied Digital (APLD) has executed a significant strategic transformation, decisively pivoting from cryptocurrency mining to become a key infrastructure provider for the high-performance computing (HPC) and AI sectors. This transition, which began in 2023 with the development of specialized data centers, was validated throughout 2024 as the company successfully launched an AI cloud service and secured major customer contracts, solidifying its market position. Looking toward its 2025 target for continued growth, APLD is focused on expanding its data center capacity and leading innovation in energy-efficient facility design, leveraging its expertise in next-generation liquid cooling to manage high-density workloads. While this rapid expansion requires significant ongoing capital expenditure, the company is pursuing strategic joint ventures to fund its large-scale project pipeline. The move has successfully repositioned APLD from a niche crypto operator to a sought-after partner in the high-growth AI computation market, where it now aims to solidify its presence despite increasing competition.

Industry Conclusion

The Liquid Cooling in Data Centers sector is undergoing a revolutionary transformation, driven by the unprecedented power and thermal demands of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The collective activities of industry leaders indicate a definitive market-wide pivot away from traditional air cooling toward advanced liquid cooling as a foundational technology. The primary trend is the rapid adoption of Direct-to-Chip (DTC) liquid cooling, championed by firms like Microsoft Azure, Aligned Data Centers, and Equinix, which is becoming the de facto standard for managing high-density hardware such as NVIDIA‘s Blackwell GPUs. Innovation is rampant, characterized by a push toward vertical integration. Hyperscalers are no longer just consumers but are now core innovators, with Google developing its Project Deschutes cooling system for its proprietary TPU hardware, AWS commercializing its In-Row Heat Exchanger (IRHX), and Microsoft Azure leveraging AI to co-design novel microfluidics cooling systems. This is paralleled by a strategic focus on sustainability, including large-scale heat reuse programs (Google, Microsoft Azure), ambitious water conservation goals (Meta Platforms‘ goal to be water positive by 2030), and a nascent but profound shift toward carbon-free baseload power, highlighted by AWS‘s landmark $20 billion investment in nuclear-powered data centers.

The collective impact of these activities is a fundamental reshaping of the digital infrastructure market. The colossal capital commitments—including $100 billion expansion plans from AWS and Oracle, an $80 billion fiscal year investment from Microsoft, and a $7 billion joint venture by Digital Realty—are catalyzing the entire ecosystem, forcing an industry-wide upgrade cycle and creating a significant first-mover advantage for those who can deploy at scale. This has been disruptive, with the rise of proprietary in-house solutions from hyperscalers reportedly creating headwinds for established cooling vendors. Concurrently, a new ecosystem of specialized suppliers and partners is emerging to support this transition. A key dynamic is the tension between the open-source hardware approach championed by Meta Platforms through its Open Rack Wide standard, which fosters broad industry alignment, and the highly optimized, proprietary stacks developed by Google and Microsoft, which create deep competitive moats. For infrastructure providers like Equinix, Digital Realty, and Aligned Data Centers, this has created a new class of premium, high-density service offerings, fundamentally altering their business models.

Looking forward, the sector’s primary challenges have shifted from technological viability to large-scale execution and systemic risk. The most significant obstacle is the growing scarcity of power in key markets, a critical constraint identified by Aligned Data Centers that threatens to bottleneck the aggressive expansion plans of all major players. This is compounded by complex global supply chains for specialized cooling components and the immense execution risk associated with delivering unprecedented projects, such as Oracle‘s 4.5GW data center for OpenAI‘s Stargate project. Furthermore, ESG and reputational risks are becoming paramount. High-profile controversies over data center water consumption, such as those faced by Google and AWS, and reliance on fossil fuels, like Oracle‘s 2.3GW natural gas PPA, demonstrate that public and regulatory scrutiny can decouple market sentiment from financial performance.

Despite these challenges, the opportunities are immense. Companies that successfully master the deployment and operation of liquid cooling at a global scale will secure a dominant competitive advantage in the AI era, defined by superior performance, lower total cost of ownership, and a powerful sustainability narrative. This has enabled specialized providers like Applied Digital (APLD) and CoreWeave to pivot and capture significant market share against established giants. The drive for sovereign AI capabilities presents a major growth vector for global operators like Oracle and Microsoft Azure. Ultimately, the sector has moved beyond pilot projects and proofs-of-concept. The future will be defined by an intense, capital-fueled race to scale proven technologies globally, with success dependent not only on technological leadership but also on the ability to navigate immense logistical, infrastructural, and regulatory complexities.