Liquid-Cooled NVIDIA Servers at the ASRock Rack OCP 2026 Booth
I keep coming back to the liquid-cooled switches. Fans have been the workhorse of server cooling for decades, and to see them replaced by coolant lines at the switch level means the heat problem has moved all the way down the stack. The NVL72 rack is the headline grabber, sure, but a switch is the thing that sits in the middle of everything, and if that needs liquid, the whole data center is essentially becoming a thermal power plant.
The part I'd want to poke at is the coolant itself. Is it water, dielectric fluid, something with a fancy name? And how does that change maintenance? You can't just swap a fan when a pump fails. I think this is where the industry is heading, though, because air simply can't carry the heat away anymore. The weird part is that the most advanced AI hardware on Earth now depends on something as old as radiators and pipes.
I'd bet the next OCP will be full of vendors arguing over connector standards and coolant compatibility. That's the real story hiding in the booth.