U.S. Multi Industry & Electrical Equipment: Liquid Cooling Primer: Cold Plates

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U.S. Multi Industry & Electrical Equipment: Liquid Cooling Primer: Cold Plates

5 July 2026

U.S. Multi Industry & Electrical Equipment

Liquid Cooling Primer: Cold Plates

As data center rack thermal densities continue to rise driven by the rapid scaling of AI Varun Govindaraj

+1 917 344 8543 workloads and increasing power density of GPUs, air cooling alone is no longer sufficient

varun.govindaraj@bernsteinsg.com to manage the heat generated by modern compute architectures. As a result, direct-to-

chip (DTC) liquid cooling has become a critical part of the data center ecosystem, with cold

Chad Dillard plates emerging as a key enabler of the transition (from air cooling to liquid cooling). At

+1 917 344 8469

chad.dillard@bernsteinsg.com the core of the liquid cooling ecosystem, two components drive the thermal loop - CDUs

(see our earlier primer) and cold plates. Cold plates perform the most important task in the

Alasdair Leslie architecture: physically transferring the heat from the chip surface to the coolant, and

+44 20 7762 4952 are the primary mechanism enabler in the liquid cooling stack.

alasdair.leslie@bernsteinsg.com

The importance of cold plates becomes apparent when viewed in the context of modern

Specialist Sales AI data center racks. For example, a single NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack can contain over

Steve Song 100 individual cold plates (one for each GPU / CPU), highlighting the scale at which they

+1 917 344 8401 are deployed. As rack densities continue to increase with next-gen GPUs expected to reach

steve.song@bernsteinsg.com

multi-thousand kW TDP levels, the ability of cold plates to efficiently manage heat flux and

thermal resistance becomes increasingly critical to overall system performance. Despite