Castrol ON: Why Partnerships Matter in Liquid Cooling Growth

As AI workloads push rack power densities to levels that air cooling can no longer manage efficiently, the data centre industry is moving towards liquid cooling at pace. 

Liquid cooling essential for meeting compute performance goals – yet many operators still encounter barriers to adoption. The reasons are rarely technical in isolation. More often, they reflect the complexity of coordinating multiple components, vendors and service commitments within a single deployment.

That complexity is precisely why no fluid supplier, hardware manufacturer or systems integrator can address liquid cooling's growth trajectory alone.

The challenge is architectural: once operators move into direct chip and immersion cooling, fluid comes into contact with every component in the system – the tank, the pump, the CDU, the piping, the wires, the servers, the chips. Every party in that chain must be aligned before a deployment can proceed with confidence.

Integrating the value chain end-to-end

Castrol ON has built its liquid cooling strategy around that reality. The company works with leading system manufacturers spanning the entire thermal management ecosystem, as well as research institutions such as the Research Institute of Sweden (RISE) and the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP), to co-engineer fluids that offer compatibility and performance assurance. The company has also partnered with Unicom Engineering, which designs liquid-cooled servers for AI and machine learning environments, with close collaboration on dielectric fluid characteristics covering both thermal performance and signal integrity.

More recently, Castrol made a strategic investment in Electronic Cooling Solutions (ECS), a US-based thermal management design and engineering company, to extend its offering beyond fluid supply into end-to-end thermal management solutions spanning system design, feasibility analysis, deployment and ongoing operational support.

Removing uncertainty across the deployment lifecycle

Partnership activity has also shaped how Castrol ON approaches service delivery. The company launched a fluid management service at Datacloud Global Congress 2025 designed to cover the entire operational lifecycle – from installation through to disposal – including system start-up, maintenance, break-fix support and fluid disposal, to be rolled out globally through its partner network.

“Data centre operators recognise the benefits of liquid cooling but need assurance around long-term fluid management,” says Peter Huang, Global President of Data Centre Thermal Management at Castrol.

“Castrol has delivered fluid services for the automotive industry for decades – we're now bringing this proven expertise to data centres with a service model that supports optimal performance throughout the entire lifecycle.”

The rationale is straightforward. Within a liquid-cooled system, the fluid is a single point of failure; degraded conditions can reduce cooling capacity and trigger equipment failure. Structured support at every stage is not a commercial add-on — it is a technical necessity.

Building confidence as adoption scales globally

Geographic expansion is also being driven through partnerships. Castrol recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with ITOCHU and ITOCHU Techno-Solutions to develop practical deployment models in Japan, combining Castrol's cooling fluids and lifecycle services with ITOCHU Techno-Solutions' systems integration capabilities and ITOCHU's energy-sector expertise and customer network.

Liquid cooling is becoming a mainstream requirement across the industry. For operators weighing up that transition, the quality of the ecosystem around a fluid provider matters as much as the fluid itself.

Andrea Zunino, Global Data Centre Offer Development Manager at Castrol ON, puts it directly: "Liquid cooling success depends on how well the ecosystem works together.

“Operators are not looking for disconnected components – they need solutions that integrate smoothly and perform reliably over time. That is why partnerships are so important. By collaborating across the value chain, we can help customers reduce complexity, accelerate deployment and build confidence as liquid cooling moves further into the mainstream."

Learn more about Castrol ON’s liquid cooling solutions and follow Castrol ON on LinkedIn.