Notice on the expansion of Nidec water cooling module production capacity

Nidec Corporation will expand its server water-cooling module CDU (Coolant Distribution Unit) production line in Thailand, planning to increase the monthly production capacity from the current 200 units to 2,000 units in June 2024.

Water cooling module

The expansion of CDU production capacity is in response to the adoption of Supermicro, a North American AI server manufacturer. We plan to expand the existing production line at our Ayutthaya plant in Thailand to produce 100-250kW products jointly developed with the company.

So far, computing servers used in data centers, companies, research institutions, etc. are mainly cooled by fans. However, as artificial intelligence continues to develop in the future, the heat generated by the semiconductor processing unit (CPU/GPU) of artificial intelligence servers for learning and processing based on large amounts of data will be significantly higher than that of traditional devices. For this reason, air-cooling systems that rely on air-conditioning equipment will have difficulty cooling a large number of servers in a building, so water-cooling systems with higher cooling capacity than air-cooling systems will become crucial in the future.

The water cooling module market is expected to continue to grow, and Nidec plans to expand its production capacity to more than 3,000 units per month in the future. In addition, Nidec expects the market size of related products to be 10 billion yen in fiscal 2023 and to exceed 80 billion yen in fiscal 2024.

Nidec's cooling system is a liquid to liquid cooling system that provides cooling water from the cooling modules installed in each server through metal pipes to directly cool the computing units in each server. It consists of three parts: a coolant distribution unit called CDU (Coolant Distribution Unit), a cooling water pipeline called CDM (Coolant Distribution Manifold), and a water cooling module called LCM (Liquid Cooling Module).

The product features redundancy of important units such as pumps, power supplies, and circuit boards, with two units each, to improve system reliability. In addition, during maintenance, these units can be replaced without stopping the cooling system (hot-swap function) to keep the server running.

In order to support the future development of artificial intelligence in the world, as a comprehensive cooling solution manufacturer, Nidec will provide products that fully reflect social needs and solutions that are one step ahead of its competitors. It will also strive to achieve the goal of leading the industry by strengthening Nidec's high-reliability product lineup.