Semiconductor
The current liquid cooling penetration rate in data centers will be only 5%-8% by the end of 2022, but it is expected that during 2023-2024, key entities in the industry chain such as chip manufacturers, server manufacturers, and IDC companies will accelerate the deployment of liquid cooling solutions , there may be a large-scale release of orders in 2025. In the next 3 to 5 years, the penetration rate of liquid cooling in domestic data centers is expected to achieve explosive growth. It is estimated that the domestic IDC liquid cooling industry market size will reach approximately 4.831 billion yuan in 2025, with an average annual compound growth rate of 71.11% during the period; it is estimated that by 2028, the market size will increase to approximately 9.872 billion yuan, with an average annual compound growth rate It is expected to be 43.02%.
As many provinces and cities actually require the design PUE of data centers to be no higher than 1.2, the adoption of new technologies such as liquid cooling is accelerating. According to IDC statistics, in the first half of 2023, China’s liquid-cooled server market size was US$660 million, an annual increase of more than 283.3%, and is expected to reach US$1.5 billion for the full year. IDC predicts that China’s liquid-cooled server market will have a compound annual growth rate of 54.7% from 2022 to 2027, reaching US$8.9 billion in 2027.
In August 2022, seven departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a green and low-carbon development action plan, requiring that by 2025, the PUE of newly built large and ultra-large data centers across the country should be reduced to less than 1.3, and the renovated core computer rooms should be reduced to less than 1.5.
According to national policies, about 70-80% of the 5 million cabinets built in the past 20 years have a PUE above 1.5 and need to be retrofitted. The most economical option for retrofitting is cold plate liquid cooling. At present, the annual demand for cold plates nationwide is between 5 billion and 6 billion. The actual transformation market is still very small compared to the potential market. The motivation for transformation mainly comes from saving electricity and avoiding fines. Future new increases may not be large in cloud computing and data centers, and will mainly focus on existing inventory transformation.
There are four mainstream directions of domestic liquid cooling, namely: spray liquid cooling, cold plate liquid cooling, one-way immersion liquid cooling, and two-way immersion liquid cooling. Cold plate liquid cooling accounts for about 65%, and one-way and two-way basically account for about 35%. The AI field basically uses one-way immersion liquid cooling, and the supercomputing field basically uses two-way immersion liquid cooling.
National policy requirements: To reduce the energy consumption of data centers, the PUE of data centers is required to be below 1.5. To meet the policy, nearly 6 million cabinets will need to be retrofitted.
Market space: In 2023, the total cold plate in China was around 6 billion, with soaking around 2 billion, and the overall price was 7 to 8 billion, which is relatively small. As for the cost of cold plate, the cost of retrofitting a cabinet is about 50,000 yuan, and 6 million cabinets is 300 billion yuan, and maintains a positive growth of 6.9%.
Semiconductor heat dissipation market: The domestic 12-inch core fab’s production capacity will be about 2.4 million pieces by 2026, and the global production capacity will reach 9.6 million pieces. If the mature process, advanced packaging technology and efficient heat dissipation of the core fab can be made good use of, I believe it will be very good. It will soon get rid of the stuck neck predicament, and high-end cooling products should only be provided by Heficent.
New energy vehicles: charging piles
According to statistics, as of 2023, there will be approximately 2.5 to 2.7 million public charging piles in China, and they will continue to expand at an annual growth rate of 50%, of which AC charging piles will account for approximately 55% and DC charging piles will account for approximately 45%.
