Research|Power and Liquid Cooling: OCP 2026 Sharpens Power Deployment Timelines; Single-Phase Cooling Has Room to Improve

Core Insights

1. In power and liquid cooling, there were no major architectural changes at OCP this year; the movement is in specs, timing and detail.

2. The NVIDIA and AMD keynotes restated existing roadmaps, and AMD’s only new launch, the Helion agentic rack, is a product-line extension rather than an architectural change.

3. The break-out sessions did show finer changes: NVIDIA wants SST deployment readiness by 2028, earlier than investors generally expect; the runway for single-phase cold plates remains intact and should stay mainstream through 2030; capacitors inside the PSU may squeeze out the CBU before it ever scales; and the ±400 V versus 800 V argument has converged on voltage-to-ground, so tray-side specs are compatible and suppliers are not facing two product lines.

4. We attended the 2026 OCP Global Summit in San Jose from October 12 to 15. Our note on power and liquid cooling below draws on learnings from the show floor and 95 sessions, 22 of which we attended in person.

5. We identify three key themes in power and liquid cooling and discuss the debates surrounding each theme, before ending the note with a roundup of discussions with investors as well as some photographs from the show floor.

Key Themes

Theme 1: In 800 VDC, the main changes are in timing and where energy storage sits, rather than architecture

1. On the facility side, NVIDIA moves the AC-to-800 VDC conversion upstream in three steps, from beside the rack to medium voltage (660 kW power rack 2026, power center 2027, 5 MW SST power block 2028). The SST schedule is earlier than investors expected, but specs and certification are unfinished, so volume still sits beyond end-2028.

2. Across rack configurations through the 570 kW generation, the rack interior remains on a 54 V busbar; the native 800 V rack is expected in 2028. Energy storage is distributed across BBUs inside the rack, PSU capacitors, CBUs in the sidecar and ESS at the SST; NVIDIA is using PSU capacitors rather than supercaps for power smoothing.

3. The ±400 V / 800 V debate converges on voltage-to-ground and tray-side specs are compatible. AMD is pushing VPD standardization at OCP, with the impact landing on supplier structure and double-sided cooling; adoption is now visible at scale on both GPUs and ASICs.

Theme 2: The single-phase cold-plate runway is longer than consensus; the change is in TIM, materials and the sidecar

1. Single-phase has a life expectancy running to 2030; two-phase is still early, with the bottleneck in packaging, TIM and the QD/manifold rather than the coolant itself. The next step for cold plates is microchannels, polymer and diamond, which are design and materials upgrades.

2. The one new item is the AALC sidecar: an existing air-cooled hall can host a near-1 MW rack without touching facility water, and it is also the most likely first commercial home for two-phase. The OCP workgroup still puts the immersion inflection at 2028.

Theme 3: Vera Rubin’s bottleneck is shifting toward full-rack testing and the data hall; rack weight is becoming a specification; quantum computing remains beyond 2029-30