FLUID
THINKING

Steven Darrah and Aysun Akik didn’t expect to end up working together: one leads enterprise sales at chip manufacturer Intel in the USA; the other heads global lubricants accounts at Shell in Europe. As anyone who has got their phones wet will know, technology and fluids don’t generally mix.

Yet Darrah and Akik came together to address a shared challenge: how to ensure reliable and effective use of liquids to cool the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

What followed was an industry first. After several years of testing, Shell’s cooling fluid became the first to receive official certification from Intel.

The certification matters because it helps overcome a major hurdle: trust. For many companies, the idea of putting liquid near sensitive electronics still feels risky.

But Intel’s certification gives immersion cooling a new level of credibility, reassuring others that it’s not just safe but also ready for real-world use.

“We do different things but, culturally speaking, there’s a similarity in the types of people at both organisations, because we’re science-forward,” says Darrah, General Manager of Intel’s North American Enterprise Solution Sales. “At Intel, almost everything we do requires us to work closely with industry leaders. Shell shares that same purposeful leadership and desire to collaborate.”

Akik, Vice President of New Business Development and Global Key Accounts at Shell, adds: “If you had asked me 20 or 30 years ago, I never would have predicted we’d end up working together. But we are both now looking at the demands of tomorrow, in different sectors.”

CERTIFIED CONFIDENCE

This certification milestone, Akik believes, could convince data centre managers that the time to move to the new immersion technologies has arrived. “The aim is to create confidence across the data industry. We’ve done extensive testing in our own laboratories, as well as in China, the USA, Germany and Japan, with computational modelling from our Bangalore team.”

Adopting the technology, she adds, brings multiple benefits compared with air cooling. “For manufacturers and data centres, it’s about potentially lowering the total cost of ownership, saving space and electricity, and reducing CO2 emissions.”

There are other benefits, beyond reducing space and energy demands. “Data centres are typically loud, agitating environments, where people have to have headphones on,” says Darrah. “When you walk into one that's strictly immersion cooling, it is a quiet, almost serene environment. They’re cool and calm.”

Immersion cooling can potentially boost energy efficiency and cut operational costs — a combination that, Darrah notes, can also have far-reaching benefits beyond data centres. “That’s important,” he says. “If people can use AI at a lower cost, the technology becomes accessible to more people globally.”