Cooling equipment specialist Gates has launched a new type of hose for liquid cooling systems, which it says is its most eco-friendly product yet.

The news comes as another vendor, GF, unveiled its latest cooling innovation, a polymer-based piping system to connect cooling distribution units (CDUs) and cold plates.

Gates are the Eco masters

Gates said the new hose, named the Data Master Eco, “redefines liquid cooling performance through sustainable, efficient manufacturing.”

It is a halogen-free design that the firm said “offers a cleaner alternative that reduces environmental impact without compromising reliability or safety.”

The company added that it has streamlined its manufacturing process for Data Master Eco to cut energy use by approximately 75 percent compared with alternatives, eliminating natural gas, water, and steam traditionally used to cure and strengthen hose materials. The company's advanced curing method also reduces carbon emissions at the source and increases production efficiency.

The resulting hose is apparently 15 percent lighter than previous generations.

"The Data Master Eco and our broader data center solutions portfolio underscore our strategy to lead in high-value, high-growth markets," said Ivo Jurek, Gates CEO.

"As AI-enabled data centers scale to meet the market demand, and the need for advanced thermal-management solutions becomes essential, we're focused on delivering application-specific, high-performing liquid-cooling technologies that will define the next generation of global infrastructure."

Founded in 1911 as a tire and rubber firm, Colorado-based Gates now develops liquid cooling solutions, using its expertise in materials science, fluid conveyances, and thermal management to provide solutions to the data center cooling industry.

GF’s polymer pipes

Elsewhere, Swiss vendor GF has debuted LiquidCore, a system of polymer pipes that can be used to manage the flow of coolant from the CDU to the rack.

LiquidCore addresses the needs of liquid-cooled data centers by “combining high-performance polymer pipes, fittings, valves, actuation, instrumentation, engineered manifolds, jointing solutions, and precision design and pre-fabrication into one integrated solution,” the company said.

GF designs and manufactures pipework to customer specifications before shipping it, prefabricated, to sites for installation.

“With LiquidCore, we combine our materials expertise and global design and pre-fabrication footprint to help scale AI computing efficiently and sustainably,” said Charles Freda, global head of data centers at GF Industry & Infrastructure Flow Solutions. “By rounding out our polymer offering from chiller to chip, we enable fully integrated flow solutions for the entire data center cooling environment with our novel solution for the data hall.”