From Lubricants to Liquid Cooling: Why Castrol is Evolving

Castrol has been a name synonymous with engine lubricants for well over a century. But as the data centre industry accelerates its transition to liquid cooling – driven by the thermal demands of AI workloads – the company is repositioning a core engineering competency for a new industrial frontier.

Through its Castrol ON platform, the company is making a deliberate push into data centre thermal management, where its expertise in fluid performance under high-heat, high-stress conditions translates directly into the cooling challenges now facing hyperscale and enterprise operators alike.

Amanda Song, Global Marketing Head at Castrol ON, says: “One of the most common reactions we hear is: ‘Castrol in data centre liquid cooling?’ – because people still associate us primarily with automotive lubricants. 

“What’s less widely known is that managing heat and performance has always been central to our expertise.” 

Castrol ON: A full liquid cooling portfolio

The Castrol ON product range targets multiple layers of the data centre cooling stack. Its Direct Liquid Cooling PG 25 fluid is designed for chip-level thermal management, and has received the OCP Inspired™ designation from the Open Compute Project – an endorsement that signals alignment with the open hardware standards increasingly favoured by large-scale operators.

At the facility level, Castrol ON has introduced its Primary Cooling Fluid DTX®, developed in partnership with Hydratech. The fluid is the company’s first product designed specifically for facility-level cooling loops, addressing the need for reliable thermal transfer across broader infrastructure rather than at the individual chip or server level.

The portfolio has also extended into adjacent applications. A proof-of-concept deployment in Beijing demonstrated the use of Castrol ON EV Thermal Fluids in a data centre cooling environment – a crossover from the electric vehicle sector that illustrates how Castrol is drawing on thermal fluid development across its business units to address data centre requirements.

Partnerships enabling end-to-end solutions

Castrol is not pursuing this market through fluid products alone. The company has entered a partnership with a hardware provider to strengthen its capability in equipment such as loadbanks, expanding what it can offer operators seeking integrated rather than component-level cooling solutions. This move reflects a broader industry shift: as liquid cooling adoption grows, customers are increasingly seeking suppliers who can address the full technology chain rather than individual parts of it.

The company is also developing monitoring technologies that allow real-time condition tracking of cooling fluids in operation. Combined with on-site service provision and a global network of testing facilities, this positions Castrol ON as a managed solution offering rather than a purely transactional product supply relationship.

AI workloads are redefining cooling demands

The context for all of this is the accelerating shift in data centre infrastructure driven by AI. As AI training and inference workloads generate substantially more heat per rack than conventional compute, rendering traditional air cooling increasingly inadequate and driving up demand for direct liquid and immersion cooling approaches. For operators, the efficiency of thermal management has become a material concern – both in terms of energy cost and hardware reliability.

For Castrol, the timing of the Castrol ON push reflects an attempt to establish credibility in the sector before liquid cooling becomes the default rather than the exception. Amanda explains this is not a pivot away from the company’s origins, but a translation of its existing science into a different industrial application. Whether that positioning resonates with data centre procurement teams will depend, in part, on whether Castrol’s engineering credentials carry weight in a sector where it has not historically been a known name.

As Amanda puts it: “Castrol ON is a natural extension of that foundation into a new environment. As data centres evolve to support increasingly intensive AI workloads, we are applying that capability to help enable more efficient liquid cooling, while expanding Castrol into a new and fast-growing space.”