NEWARK — In December 2023, Odessa High School students poured into labs at the Chemours Discovery Hub during a field trip to explore future career opportunities while they marveled at membranes and tested out spectroscopy machines to examine polymers. Inside one of the labs, Chemours associates showed off a glass tank filled with a clear liquid, bubbling around a motherboard.
Less than two years later, that clear liquid — Opteon 2P50 — is finally closer to commercialization.
Chemours signed a deal with global data center company NTT DATA and engineering firm Hibiya Engineering, Ltd. to launch a full-scale product trial. The deal comes after months of successful tests after the initial molecule discovery was made at the Discovery Hub.
Opteon 2P50 is a dielectric fluid, meaning it was specially engineered to not conduct electricity. In two-phase immersion, electronics that heat up from using significant energy can be safely submerged in Opteon in which they can then be cooled down to 49 degrees once the liquid starts to boil.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, Chemours believes the product would be a game-changer to the data center industry. As AI adoption continues to accelerate with next generation graphics and central processing chips becoming standard, the company believes there will be a need to quickly cool machines down.
Just recently, Microsoft announced plans to spend $80 billion on data center infrastructure with several billion dollars to be invested in cooling.
“The amount of growth the data center industry has gone through in the last two to three years has almost doubled what was installed in the inception stage, in terms of capacity, and a lot of it is driven by AI,” Chemours Global Market Manager for Immersion Cooling Ventures Brandon Marshall said.
“All these tools like ChatGPT are required to build out huge amounts of infrastructure and hardware,” he added. “That’s really what’s driving a lot of this conversation about liquid cooling.”
Under the leadership of its new CEO Denise Dignam, Chemours announced in late 2024 it would be focusing on a core group of products, including Opteon 2P50. Last year, the chemical company saw sales for the Opteon brand of refrigerants grow 14%.
Chemours reports that Opteon 2P50 can reduce data center cooling energy consumption by 90%, compared to air cooling.
There could also be a secondary market in cooling electric vehicle batteries as well as power storage. Marshall said that Opteon 2P50 can work to extend battery life, as it would protect batteries from air and potential corrosion.
But with one of the top 10 data center companies like NTT DATA interested in testing the product out, Marshall believes that’s a strong indicator on the interest for data centers alone.
“Companies like that want to be confident they understand the technology, and the trial is to show if a problem happens in their real data, how would they address it” Marshall said. “It’s going from a tank at the Discovery Hub to one of the thousands of tanks in those centers.”
Chemours bas recently published a case study on Opteon 2P50. By the end of this year, the company expects to launch the next version of the product with marketing at industry events like the Open Compute Project Global Summit, among others.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correctly reflect that Chemours plans to use industry events like the Open Compute Project to best market the product.
