News29 October 2026

Liquid cooling and the space under the raised floor

AI servers run much hotter, so more server rooms are moving to liquid cooling, for example coolant piped straight to cold plates on the chips. The next question is where the pipes go, and how you find out if one leaks.

A white paper from the Open Compute Project (OCP), the global data centre hardware community, explains that in a raised floor room you can run leak detection cable in the void along the pipe routes, or put drip trays with sensors under the floor. One example is TACC in the US, which has a subfloor leak detection system for its Frontera supercomputer.

Another lesson from a US national lab: the facility manifolds sat under the raised floor, and small leaks were not big enough to set off the alarm. The team moved the sensing cable closer to the likely leak points, switched to a cable that shows where the leak is, and added LED strip lights under the floor so small drips are easy to spot.

Our take: if liquid cooling might be in your future, plan the void height for pipes, drip trays and sensing cable at the design stage, and lay out the grid so the panels along the pipe routes are easy to lift for checks and repairs.

Is your room still air only, or are you planning for liquid? Talk to us on LINE @684ubper or Page Messenger, and see more about raised floors at anbs.co.th.

Sources

• Open Compute Project, ACS Leak Detection and Intervention White Paper (2021)
• Open Compute Project, ACS Liquid Cooling Cold Plate Requirements

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