Castrol ON Report | Page 7

Despite the urgency, the liquid cooling market remains fragmented in ways that complicate deployment. There is no universally agreed standard governing how systems should be designed, flushed, cleaned or tested. Every project, in Peter’ s experience, requires some degree of customisation – regardless of how it is presented at the specification stage.

“ No one has really been able to establish a standardised system,” he says.“ Every site needs some customisation. And I’ m being real here, because every time we quote something, there’ s going to be some sort of customisation. The procedure is not even standardised or defined. So that is a big issue, because everyone does it very differently.”

Castrol is actively working with industry bodies – including Open Compute Project Foundation( OCP) and American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning

Engineers( ASHRAE) – to address this. But standardisation is a slow process, and the market is not waiting.

In the meantime, supply chain lead times have compounded the problem. Components for liquid cooling systems are currently running at six to nine months for delivery. For data centre operators who need equipment on site immediately to support live deployments, that gap creates real operational risk.

The absence of standard warranty frameworks is a related concern. Peter is candid about where the industry stands: nobody is currently in a position to offer a five-year warranty on a full liquid cooling system, let alone ten. Testing and compatibility verification across the full stack of components – cold plates, coolants, CDUs, chillers – remains a complex and largely bespoke exercise on each project.