Chinese telecoms firm ZTE has launched a high-density liquid-cooled cabinet called IceCube, aimed at green data centers, with plug-and-play connectors designed for robotic installation.

The cabinet is a fully integrated solution with blind connections for power and network, as well as water connections to cold plates and cooling in the cabinet doors. It was launched this week at Mobile World Congress 2024 (MWC) in Barcelona.

Liquid cooling has been gaining ground as a way to allow the higher rack power densities demanded by AI and high-performance computing, but data center operators have seen it as invasive and resisted technologies such as direct-to-chip cooling and immersion which would require major changes to data centers.

The IceCube combines two less invasive cooling methods, which circulate water through the cabinet door, and also to cold plates adjacent to hot components. These can be used with few changes to the IT hardware. ZTE's tactic of combining them in a single pre-configured model is intended to overcome objections by making liquid cooling easy to adopt.

The cabinet can hold 40 1U servers, packed closely with "zero-gap" deployment, taking the potential rack power consumption to 100kW. Depending on how this is integrated into the data center, this can boost efficiency, with ZTE provisioning a "partial PUE" value less than 1.1.

The water circulation is via blind connectors, so equipment can be installed and replaced without leaks. The power is similarly streamlined with a bus bar, and there is a blind connection system for networks as well.

ZTE's release says the simplified connection approach "greatly simplifies the O&M and delivery process and meets the future automatic preventive maintenance and robot O&M requirements."