Lubrizol Corporation, a provider of specialty chemicals for the transportation, industrial and consumer markets based in Wickliffe, Ohio, U.S.A.,  announced a partnership with Submer, with offices in Barcelona, Spain and Palo Alto, California, U.S.A., that will enable the next leap forward in data center productivity, reliability, and sustainability with immersion cooling system solutions for today’s complex data center market.

Today, data centers are largely cooled by extensive air conditioners, an inefficient and expensive cooling solution. Immersion cooling allows servers to instead be cooled directly at their source. Cooling servers with a unique blend of advanced server tanks and patent-pending thermal management fluids will enable greater computing power, energy efficiency, and location flexibility. 

This partnership is one of several for the Lubrizol Corporate Ventures team in the area of thermal management and data center immersion fluids.

This partnership will leverage Lubrizol’s 93-year experience in the petroleum additives sector, with custom fluid solutions and Submer’s proven track-record in the immersion cooling space. The combination of Lubrizol’s formulation experience, rheological expertise, and testing prowess means that the fluid dynamics and system compatibility will deliver on current customer challenges. Add to that, the groundbreaking products and platforms designed by Submer, and the solutions coming from this partnership promise to be innovative and deliver increased next-level efficiencies. Bringing these capabilities together makes the necessary computing power accessible for more partners and more regions of the world where the standard air-conditioned cooled data centers were challenged due to temperature or poor air quality.

“Under current standards, data center servers have a lifecycle of about two to three years, far short of the life of a typical server,” said Matt Joyce, vice president, Commercial, Lubrizol Corporate Ventures. “The partnership between Lubrizol and Submer unlocks the potential to create tailored solutions that will last the full lifespan of our partners’ servers, in the range of five to 10 years, while delivering needed thermal performance and compatibility with the systems. Unlocking this tailored and balanced performance means our partners will have a distinct advantage in today’s fast-growing market.”

“At Submer, our focus is always on enabling the next generation of cooling and automation technology for data and energy-intense environments and to achieve this, we will require a partner that brings tailored formulating capabilities, testing expertise, the ability to stand-by the technology, and the needed supply chain to help us scale this technology globally. Lubrizol is from today a key partner on this journey,” said Daniel Pope, co-founder and CEO, Submer. “Combining our fully-integrated, highly-efficient and sustainable technologies with Lubrizol’s experience in formulation and testing means we can deliver on the promise of solving the challenges of today and power the use cases of the future.”