[2025] The SHINDEV Research Team believes that liquid cooling solutions demonstrate clear and comprehensive advantages in ensuring system safety, reducing energy consumption, and improving thermal efficiency for both energy storage systems and data centers (IDCs). Liquid cooling is rapidly evolving from an “optional upgrade” into a core infrastructure layer. In incremental energy storage deployments and high-power computing scenarios, liquid cooling continues to replace traditional air cooling, driven by superior heat dissipation efficiency, lower power consumption, and better adaptability to high thermal density environments.
As a critical node within liquid cooling systems, liquid cooling connectors enable fast, sealed, and reliable circulation of coolant. Their performance and reliability directly determine the engineering feasibility, stability, and scalability of liquid cooling systems. As a result, liquid cooling connectors are gaining increasing attention across the industry.
SHINDEV notes that energy storage systems are evolving toward higher safety standards and lower total lifecycle costs (TCO/LCC), while high-density data centers are accelerating thermal upgrades under the dual pressures of rising power density and stricter energy constraints. Together, these two application scenarios represent the primary growth drivers of the liquid cooling industry. Meanwhile, key components such as connectors are entering a phase characterized by high technical barriers, limited production capacity, and supply-demand imbalance, creating opportunities for companies with strong R&D and engineering capabilities to secure early market leadership.
Currently, thermal management technologies include air cooling, liquid cooling, heat pipes, and phase-change cooling. Among these, heat pipe and phase-change solutions remain largely at the experimental or pilot stage, with limited large-scale commercial adoption. At present, air cooling and liquid cooling remain the dominant approaches.
Compared with air cooling, liquid cooling offers significantly higher heat transfer efficiency and stronger adaptability to complex environments. In scenarios involving high dust levels, enclosed containers, or increasing thermal density, liquid cooling enables more stable thermal control while reducing noise and energy consumption associated with fans. Although China entered the liquid cooling market later than overseas peers, SHINDEV observes that rapid progress has been made in recent years, with increasing coordination across the upstream, midstream, and downstream value chain, supported by accumulated experience from large-scale pilot projects.
Within the new energy storage landscape, electrochemical energy storage has become the dominant solution for large-scale applications, with lithium-ion batteries leading due to cost efficiency and industrial maturity. Lithium batteries require strict temperature control, as operating temperature directly impacts efficiency, lifespan, and safety. Liquid cooling enables more precise temperature regulation and uniform heat dissipation, significantly reducing lifecycle costs, especially for large-scale, long-duration storage systems.
Compared with air cooling, liquid cooling provides clear advantages in:
Battery lifespan: Air cooling often leads to uneven heat dissipation under high thermal loads, accelerating cell degradation discrepancies. Liquid cooling ensures uniform temperature control through convective heat exchange.
Operating energy consumption: Air cooling relies on indirect cooling via airflow, resulting in sharply increased fan power consumption at higher inlet temperatures. Liquid cooling requires lower flow rates to achieve effective thermal control. Industry data indicates that under identical coolant inlet temperatures (295K), the minimum energy consumption of air cooling systems can be 6.66 times higher than that of liquid cooling.
Fixed costs and footprint: Liquid cooling eliminates the need for large ventilation channels, reducing land use and structural redundancy in large energy storage projects.
For data centers, liquid cooling represents not only a thermal upgrade but also a strategic tool for optimizing total cost of ownership. Public data shows that energy consumption accounts for 60%–70% of IDC operating costs. As AI and other high-power workloads increase computing density, average rack power is expected to reach 25 kW by 2025, pushing traditional air cooling toward its technical limits.
Liquid cooling solutions in IDCs are generally classified as:
Indirect liquid cooling (cold plate cooling), where heat-generating components do not directly contact the coolant, requiring minimal system modification and offering strong commercial readiness;
Direct liquid cooling (immersion or spray cooling), where components are immersed in dielectric coolant, delivering higher thermal efficiency and long-term potential.
SHINDEV emphasizes that liquid cooling connectors serve as high-reliability interfaces between coolant loops and equipment. Their performance directly affects sealing integrity, maintainability, and long-term system stability. These connectors typically feature quick-coupling and valve-controlled designs to ensure safe, contamination-free connection and disconnection.
In both energy storage and data center applications, liquid cooling connectors require integration of mechanical design, fluid dynamics, materials chemistry, and valve technology, resulting in significantly higher engineering barriers than conventional electrical connectors. SHINDEV observes that only a limited number of manufacturers are capable of mass-producing high-quality liquid cooling connectors, creating a structurally constrained supply environment.
SHINDEV believes that continued growth in energy storage capacity and rising adoption of liquid cooling will support sustained demand for liquid cooling connectors. In the data center sector, rapid growth in AI-driven workloads and increasing thermal density further amplify connector demand.
On the supply side, high precision manufacturing requirements and multidisciplinary technical barriers limit short-term capacity expansion. Companies with strong R&D foundations, proven engineering capabilities, and customer validation experience are well positioned to establish early competitive advantages as the market scales.
SHINDEV concludes that under the dual trends of enhanced safety and cost reduction in energy storage and rising thermal density and energy constraints in data centers, liquid cooling is transitioning from a solution-level choice to a core infrastructure layer. As a decisive component for system reliability, liquid cooling connectors are expected to be among the earliest beneficiaries of this transition, presenting a high-barrier, supply-constrained growth opportunity. Companies capable of sustained R&D investment, engineering validation, and scalable delivery are likely to secure long-term leadership positions in the liquid cooling connector market.
