The Next Era of Single-Phase Cooling
Pioneering liquid metal cooling systems to power the next generation of compute infrastructure
As silicon architectures evolve to meet the intense demands of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, chip power is reaching 2 kW and beyond, making thermal management one of the industry’s most urgent challenges. Molten Dynamics™ engineers high-efficiency liquid metal cooling systems as a scalable alternative designed to integrate with existing infrastructure and extend the capabilities of single-phase cooling.
The Thermal Bottleneck
AI Is Driving Unprecedented Heat Density
Next-generation AI and HPC workloads generate intense, localized die-level heat fluxes that legacy cooling systems cannot dissipate.
Liquid and Air Cooling Is Struggling to Keep Pace
As traditional cooling hits physical limits, thermal stress forces processor throttling, shortens lifecycles, and elevates failure rates, making thermal management the primary bottleneck to Moore’s Law.
Thermal Architecture Bottlenecks
The Limits of Air Cooling
Direct air cooling generally encounters a practical physical limit between 300 W and 400 W per socket. Beyond 400 W, heatsink volumetric requirements and fan power draw become unsustainable for high density rack configurations.
The Limits of Water Cooling
Direct-to-chip single-phase water glycol loops encounter severe boundary layer thermal resistance between 1 kW and 1.5 kW per socket. Pushing beyond this requires excessive fluid velocities and high pressure drops that risk plumbing integrity and increase parasitic pumping work.
Water Won’t Scale Forever
Water cooling loops face inherent thermal resistance at the fluid boundary layer, limiting how rapidly heat can transfer from the silicon surface into the cooling fluid. Attempting to overcome this bottleneck by continually increasing flow rates, fluid velocity, and system pressure produces diminishing returns in thermal efficiency while pushing plumbing infrastructure beyond its optimal operating parameters.
Extending Single-Phase Cooling
As chip manufacturers, OEMs, and hyperscale data center operators confront the limits of conventional cooling, they face a difficult choice: adopt increasingly complex cooling architectures or find a way to extend the benefits of single-phase cooling. Two-phase and immersion cooling can address higher thermal loads, but they also introduce significant operational, maintenance, and infrastructure challenges. Molten Dynamics offers another path: higher-performance heat removal within a sealed, single-phase architecture designed to integrate with existing systems.
Two-Phase Cooling
How It Works
- Phase-change vaporization
Operational Impact
- Complex pressure controls and maintenance
- Facility overhaul and specialized tanks
- High fluid costs and environmental risks
Immersion
How It Works
- Total fluid immersion
Operational Impact
- Facility overhaul and horizontal tank retrofits
- Messy fluid handling and complex server maintenance
- Heavy fluid weight requiring structural floor reinforcement
Molten Dynamics
How It Works
- Sealed liquid-metal loop
Operational Impact
- Integrates directly into existing facility infrastructure
- Preserves standard vertical rack and server chassis layouts
- Enables next generation power densities with zero fluid handling
How Liquid Metal Cooling Works
Molten Dynamics replaces conventional cooling fluid within a sealed, purpose-built thermal loop with a high-conductivity liquid metal alloy. The system captures heat at the processor, transports it through the closed loop, and transfers it to existing facility water or air-cooling infrastructure. The result is a higher-performance approach to heat removal that preserves the simplicity of single-phase cooling.
The Closed-Loop System
Molten Dynamics uses a completely sealed, self-contained closed-loop component architecture designed to fit within standard server configurations. The liquid metal continuously circulates between the processor and a compact heat exchanger, rapidly moving heat away from the silicon while remaining fully contained within the system.
Heat Transfer with Liquid Metal
Liquid metal cooling is more than a simple fluid replacement. Molten Dynamics combines custom hardware design with gallium-based alloys that offer more than 100x the thermal conductivity of standard propylene glycol mixtures. The entire loop is engineered as a cohesive thermodynamic system to transfer heat rapidly, reduce thermal resistance, and eliminate localized hot spots.
Integration with Existing Architectures
Molten Dynamics’ closed-loop systems are engineered to couple directly with standard facility water lines or existing air-cooled heat sinks. This drop-in architecture is designed to extend the performance of existing cooling infrastructure without requiring modifications to the underlying compute architecture or broader facility systems.
MHD Pump Technology
As a key capability within the thermal architecture, Molten Dynamics offers solid-state magnetohydrodynamic pumping engineered specifically to circulate conductive liquid metal. By applying electromagnetic forces rather than mechanical impellers, this option provides silent, zero-maintenance fluid movement for maximum long term reliability. Standard mechanical pumping options are also supported depending on specific platform requirements.
How MHD Pumps Work
Magnetohydrodynamic pumps move conductive liquid metal without mechanical impellers or gears. By applying a controlled magnetic field and a perpendicular electrical current through the fluid, the system generates a continuous Lorentz force that propels the liquid metal through the cooling loop.
Benefits of No Moving Parts
By eliminating moving parts, the solid-state pump eliminates mechanical wear, bearing failures, and operational vibration. Fewer potential failure points support long-term reliability, reduce maintenance requirements, and help meet the demanding lifecycle expectations of enterprise and hyperscale computing environments.
Materials and Safety
Material Compatibility
Molten Dynamics systems use highly stable, non-toxic gallium-based alloys engineered for compatibility with the materials used throughout high-performance compute infrastructure. Loop components are designed for long-term reliability across copper, stainless steel, nickel, titanium, and advanced polymers, supporting a robust deployment lifecycle.
Safety and Toxicity
The core fluid consists of non-toxic, stable alloys that remain liquid well below room temperature. Unlike specialized synthetic fluids used in some two-phase cooling systems, the alloys avoid concerns related to high global warming potential and other environmental and health risks.
Sustainability
By operating as a highly efficient, single-phase closed loop at the rack level, the Molten Dynamics platform can reduce the energy required to drive cooling infrastructure pumps. Greater system-level efficiency has the potential to reduce cooling-related power and water demands across hyperscale data center infrastructure.
Performance, Data, and Scalability
Molten Dynamics validates its liquid metal cooling architecture through computational modeling, physical prototype testing, and direct benchmark comparisons. Experimental results closely track simulated performance while demonstrating significantly higher heat transfer than a competing single-phase water system.
Up to 2.6×
Higher heat transfer coefficient than a single-phase water competitor
What Are You Trying to Keep Cool?
Whether you’re designing the next generation of AI chips, building high-density compute platforms, or scaling hyperscale data center infrastructure, we’d like to hear what thermal challenges you’re working to solve.