Fujitsu, Supermicro working on Arm-based liquid cooled servers for 2027

Fujitsu is collaborating with Supermicro to build liquid-cooled servers by 2027, according to a report by The Register. These liquid cooler servers will be based on Fujitsu’s upcoming ARM-based Monaka processor, which is slated to be released in the same timeframe.

The combination of liquid cooling and Fujitsu’s energy-efficient Monaka chips is aimed at combating sky-high demand for data center capacity, which has become greater than what can be supplied thanks to various factors, including AI. One of the biggest obstacles preventing accelerated data center capacity development the ability to meet the growing power consumption of modern datacenter chips. By combining the efficiency of the ARM architecture with liquid cooling, Fujitsu and Supermicro hope to offer a market-leading server portfolio for their customers. 

Monaka is the name of Fujitsu’s next generation ARM-based datacenter processor. The new chip is aimed at AI, HPC, and datacenter deployments featuring 150 Armv9-A cores with SVE2. Monaka is designed to take full advantage of the power efficiency of the ARM architecture, and Fujitsu has set an ambitious goal of having Monaka be twice as power-efficient as its competitors’ chips — not its competitors’ current chips, but those that will be made in 2026 and 2027. Monaka will be built on TSMC’s 2nm fabrication process.

Fujitsu apparently originally designed these CPUs with air cooling in mind. However, the manufacturer is now shifting gears in this partnership with Supermicro. The main goal is to reduce the size of Monaka-based servers; liquid cooling paired with highly power-efficient processors allows designers to build highly compact cooling solutions. 

It’s also likely that liquid cooling Monaka could result in greater power efficiency gains as compared to air cooling. Testing by SMC has revealed that Nvidia’s GPU servers are 50% more power efficient when using submersion liquid cooling compared to air cooling. We don’t know how exactly these servers will be setup, but Fujitsu and Supermicro have an opportunity to make some of the densest and most power-efficient servers in the world by 2027, if Fujitsu can deliver on its goals for Monaka.