Nidec Corporation has announced it will enhance its CDU (Coolant Distribution Unit) production line in Thailand. Primarily, this is the company’s manufacturing base for water-cooling modules for servers. As a result, it will increase the factory’s monthly CDU production capacity from 200 to 2,000 units by June 2024.

The company decided to expand CDU production capacity amid the adoption by Supermicro, an American AI server manufacturer. Specifically, the company’s production line at the Ayutthaya Plant will manufacture the jointly developed products, ranging from 100 to 250kW.

Higher Demand for Water Cooling Systems

Mainly, computing servers in data centers, research institutes, and other similar facilities employ the fan-based air-cooling method. However, with the AI market expected to grow going forward, semiconductor-based arithmetic units (CPUs and GPUs) generate significantly more heat than their predecessors. Mainly, these CPUs utilize AI to process learning information with big data. Thus, the air-cooling method, which relies on air-conditioning equipment, is insufficient to cool a myriad of servers in a building. Meanwhile, the water-cooling system has far superior cooling capability than the air-cooling systems, making it indispensable in the future.

Further, the water-cooling module market is forecast to continue its growth. Thus, Nidec intends to expand its monthly CDU production capacity to more than 3,000 units in the future. Meanwhile, it expects the market size of related products to reach 10 billion yen in FY2023 and jump to more than 80 billion yen in FY2024.

Liquid-to-liquid Method

Nidec’s cooling systems employ a liquid-to-liquid method. This way, cooling modules in each server supply cooling water via metal pipes and directly cool each server’s computing devices. Specifically, the systems comprise a CDU (coolant distribution unit), a cooling water distributor; a CDM (coolant distribution manifold), a cooling water piping; and an LCM (liquid cooling module), a water-cooling module.

The aforementioned product features the redundancy of its pumps, electricity sources, circuit substrates, and other important units. They are all featured in pairs to improve the system’s reliability. Additionally, those units are replaced even during maintenance, without stopping its cooling system. This way, the server keeps operating (a hot-swap functionality).

Nidec aims to contribute to the development of the AI world. Thus, it stays committed to working as a comprehensive thermal solution manufacturer to provide products that perfectly reflect people’s needs. By offering proposals a step ahead of the competition, and with an enhanced lineup of its high-reliability products, Nidec presses ahead to become a market leader.

-22 April 2024-