Executive Summary
- Microfluidics and immersion cooling, both as an alternative or alongside cold plates, are seen as key cooling technologies for the data centre in 2026, according to a Soben report
- Microsoft made a breakthrough in microfluidics, publishing research in September which showed performance of up to three times better than cold plates at removing heat
- Microsoft’s Sashi Majety noted that within five years, if organisations are ‘still relying heavily on traditional cold plate technology… [they will be] stuck’
A data centre trends report from construction consultant Soben argues that microfluidics may be set for its ‘breakthrough’ moment, while immersion cooling is also set to see wider deployment. So what are the current use cases, and what does the road ahead look like?
The report from Soben, part of Accenture, outlines 10 key data centre trends for 2026. At number six is breakthrough cooling solutions. With AI at the heart of so many present and future data centre workloads making it the hottest topic right now – literally and figuratively – liquid cooling has established itself as the answer. As Gordon Johnson of Subzero Engineering wrote for Data Centre Insight in October, the AI data centre must have advanced thermal strategies integrated into its infrastructure, from liquid cooling to direct-to-chip.
Cold plates are just one card in the liquid cooling deck, including coolant distribution units (CDUs), liquid-cooled servers and heat rejection units. In September, Microsoft published research which showed that microfluidics – where cooling is brought inside the chip itself – performed up to three times better than cold plates at removing heat – dependent on workloads and configurations.
Microfluidics also reduced the maximum temperature rise of the silicon inside a GPU by 65%, with performance varying on the type of chip used. Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is also expected to improve. The tech giant teamed up with Switzerland-based startup Corintis as part of the initiative.
The use case offered for its in-chip microfluidic cooling system was for a simulated Microsoft Teams meeting. As a set of hundreds of different services – one to connect a customer to a meeting, another to store the chat, another to transcribe and so on – different parts of the server are called upon, and heat up accordingly when heavily utilised. Running the servers harder at peak times such as five minutes before the hour or half-hour when most Teams calls start, known as overclocking, makes economic sense but makes chips even hotter. Microfluidics, as a more efficient cooler of the chip, can therefore enable greater overclocking.
Sashi Majety, senior technical program manager for cloud operations and innovation at Microsoft, posited that by the end of the decade, ‘if you’re still relying heavily on traditional cold plate technology, you’re stuck.’
The concept of microfluidics is by no means a recent one. As far back as 1981, Stanford researchers published a paper which explored how heat could be removed more effectively through ‘microchannels’ as a key part of VLSI (very large scale integration) chips. In 2002, an initial attempt to commoditise in the data centre market came through the launch of Cooligy – the founders all being Stanford professors – later acquired by Emerson Network Power. Use cases today range from inkjet printheads to ‘lab on a chip.’ Regarding the former, one chip project involves leveraging HP’s commercialised fifth generation of its inkjet microfluidics platform to NVIDIA’s GPU chip surface.
Regarding immersion cooling, the Soben report notes various initiatives in 2025 which point to wider deployment. Shell’s launch of its DLC Fluid S3 in June was aimed at both the direct-to-chip and full immersion cooling solutions markets. “We’re not just keeping data centres cool in the age of AI – we’re powering the future of digital infrastructure,” said Aysun Akik, VP at Shell Lubricants at the time.
“It is worth noting that – at least in the near future – data centres will deploy a mixture of air cooling and versions of liquid cooling,” the Soben report ultimately notes. “Evaporative cooling which uses vast amounts of water will be phased out; in a world where the changing climate is already causing water shortages, data centres that exacerbate this problem will not be accepted by neighbouring communities.
“The real challenge for data centre developers is how to futureproof their facilities so that the right cooling systems, with optimised energy efficiency, can be deployed in the right places. Designers and suppliers are turning to advanced modelling and digital to help them optioneer and navigate the changes that might occur.”
