Reliability Risk Assessment and Standardization Strategy for Single-Phase Immersion-Cooled Data Center

Recently, immersion cooling has been widely adopted in hyperscale data centers. Despite the rapid adoption, its reliability challenges remain insufficiently addressed due to a lack of standardization. This study identifies the potential reliability risks of data center under immersion cooling, and proposes a standardization strategy to bridge the gap between current protocols and immersion-specific environments. First, utilizing a FMMEA, this study systematically identifies and prioritizes potential failure mechanisms of data center server under immersion cooling. The results highlight immersion specific failure mechanisms such as absorption, environmental stress cracking, corrosion, and oxidation that can introduce reliability risks distinct from those in air cooled data center operation. Based on the FMMEA results, a gap analysis of existing reliability standards is comprehensively conducted across methodology, domain, and practice levels. This analysis reveals that current practice-level standards, predominantly designed for air cooling, fail to capture the identified unique failure mechanism. Consequently, the direct application of current standards can lead to inaccurate reliability assessments. Finally, this study suggests specific modifications to current reliability standards to address these identified gaps. By aligning failure mechanisms with test methods, this work provides a strategic direction for developing reliability standards tailored to immersion-cooled environments.