Executive Summary

• Immersion cooling is the gold standard for new infrastructure, direct-to-chip is the king of the retrofits, enabling operators to upgrade their tech within the architectural constraints of the data centre floor.
• Direct-to-chip reduces heat generated by running a flow of liquid coolant directly on the surface of the micropressor.
• It has a range of advantages over immersion cooling, not to mention targeted efficiency, reduced price tag and enables legacy data centres to adopt hybrid cooling strategies.

Direct-to-chip is the alternative liquid cooling strategy when you don’t want to bath your hardware, or if you simply don’t have space for the bath and you’re more of a shower person instead.

Instead of fully submerged components, direct-to-chip cooling reduces heat generated by running a flow of liquid coolant directly on the surface of the micropressor. Like immersion cooling, it completely forgoes the need for water by using a non-conductive liquid coolant, so even in the disastrous case of leaking, the processing chip won’t fail.

How does it work?

Cold plates are placed onto the components; they have a flow channel for the dielectric fluid. The cold plate, made from a thermal interface material that can conduct heat from the chip, touches the surface, and the coolant passes through the plate and draws heat from the components.

Like other cooling solutions, there are several components included in direct-to-chip systems, including a circulator pump that pumps coolant through the system, where it heads to a heat exchanger to dissipate the heat, before being circulated back to the GPUs and CPUs.

There are two types you should know about:

• Single-Phase Direct-to-Chip – this is where a pump pushes coolant through a closed-loop system. It warms up as it draws heat away from the hardware via the plate, then it flows to the heat exchanger, where it cools, before cycling back through the system again. Whilst a simple approach, the reliance on pumps does add a risk of failure, unexpected overheating, and leaking that would cause damage.
• Two-Phase Direct-to-Chip – this system places the chip into a bath of dielectric fluid, which heats up to the boiling point and evaporates. The resulting vapour rises, condenses back to fluid in condenser tubes, which directs the coolant back into the endless passive cooling loop. This method has several advantages over single-phase cooling; it can handle high-density environments because its heat absorption capacity is larger and no pumps are needed, resulting in a system with fewer points of failure. However, it’s complex to manage and costs a great deal more to set up and maintain.

Direct-to-chip is the king of the cooling methods for retrofit

Immersion cooling is more of a total lifestyle change, whereas direct-to-chip is more of a home renovation; it has captured over 50% of the liquid cooling marketing in 2025, and for three very good reasons.

Retrofitting existing infrastructure to meet modernise and meet demands for high-density workloads means the space is limited and they have to work with the building they have, concrete walls and all. Most retrofits won’t have space for huge, heavy immersion tanks that need the entire data centre floor to be redesigned. Direct-to-chip will fit into the existing racks, no need to do a full DIY SOS of the building to utilise DTC. All you do is swap the air fans out for the cold plates and add a manifold to the side of the rack – voila! That way, you increase rack density from 15kW to 100kW+ without moving things around.

Not every data centre is ready to go full-on liquid cooling; in fact, most legacy data centres aren’t, so they keep their air cooling systems and CRAC units for the less demanding servers whilst installing DTC for the higher density, AI workloads. This hybrid approach really is the bridge into 2026 for cooling solutions for most infrastructure, so they’re not over-investing into tech that they don’t actually need.

DTC brings targeted efficiency to the table through how it works; heat isn’t even spread, but more concentrated around certain componenets (like, 80% of the heat comes from the chips), so DTC focuses all its energy on the hotspots, whereas immersion means you’re fully submerging severs and that can be wasteful.

Not only is DTC King of the Retrofits, but also the monarchy for the industry; this revolution will keep the UK’s digital lights on in this year and beyond. Immersion cooling is the gold standard for brand new AI infrastructure, DTC is the essential bridge for the hundreds of existing data centres operating right now.