Alloy Enterprises has announced single-piece, leak-tight cold plates designed to extend direct liquid cooling across the entire server blade—including memory modules (DIMMs), network interface cards (NICs), and quad small form-factor pluggables (QSFPs). According to Alloy Enterprises, these new cold plates leverage its patented Stack Forging process to deliver full-blade cooling, which addresses the emerging 100 kW peripheral heat bottleneck in next-generation 600 kW server racks.
Historically, graphics processing units (GPUs) represented about 80 percent of a blade’s power consumption, with peripherals like DIMMs, NICs, and QSFPs handling the remainder. This peripheral load was typically within the reach of air cooling. Alloy Enterprises reports that, in current high-density racks such as those using the NVIDIA NVL72 (120–140 kW), peripherals generate 24–28 kW of heat—still manageable with airflow. However, projected 600 kW-class systems, such as NVIDIA’s Kyber-based Rubin platform, are expected to push peripheral heat loads above 100 kW, exceeding the limits of airflow cooling and creating a bottleneck that can impact compute availability and data center revenue.
The company’s single-piece cold plates feature internal microgeometries and monolithic construction, allowing for efficient, high-pressure, leak-free cooling where traditional brazed or soldered assemblies cannot perform. Rated to 2,000 psi without deformation, the cold plates maintain structural integrity under extreme flow rates. Alloy offers a variety of plug-and-play microgeometries, optimized to extract heat from each peripheral for next-generation server blade constraints.
Alloy Enterprises details that its cold plates provide targeted benefits for specific data center components. For DIMMs, dual-sided cooling supports modules above 40 W and enables servicing without draining the cooling loop, while reducing up to 32 solder joints in dense configurations. For QSFPs, each plate handles up to 50 W per port—covering 800 G and 1.6 T optical modules—enabling high I/O density without requiring bulky manifolds. For NICs and specialty application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), the solution manages devices with heat flux densities exceeding current top-performing GPUs, fits into tight board geometries, and maintains uniform cooling.
Dr. Ali Forsyth, CEO and co-founder of Alloy Enterprises, explained, “Direct liquid cooling no longer stops at the GPU,” said Dr. Ali Forsyth, CEO and co-founder of Alloy Enterprises. “What used to be the ‘other 20%’ of blade power is quickly becoming a major heat source that air cooling simply can’t handle. Our single-piece cold plates extend efficient, reliable liquid cooling to every component, enabling true 100% coverage at rack scale.” He added, “As rack power climbs toward 600 kW, the industry must rethink how it manages every watt of heat. Stack Forging from Alloy enables new design freedoms for direct liquid cooling across the blade, and our single-piece construction addresses reliability risks inherent in incumbent solutions that include brazing and soldering.”
Alloy Enterprises states that these solutions are now shipping for use in data center applications, as well as other industrial and military sectors.
Source: Alloy Enterprises
