Guolian Minsheng Securities: The liquid cooling infrastructure market is expected to grow rapidly, focusing on liquid cooling suppliers with strong technology and deep customer accumulation

According to the Zhitong Finance APP, Guolian Minsheng Securities released a research report stating that with the accelerated shipment of the new generation of high-performance computing chips both domestically and internationally, the penetration rate of liquid cooling in data centers is expected to rise rapidly, driving further growth in orders from various liquid cooling infrastructure suppliers, gradually entering a phase of rapid performance growth. It is recommended to pay attention to the domestic leader Envicool (002837.SZ), which has a comprehensive product line and rich customer resources, and is expected to further expand its overseas supply chain; Shenling (301018.SZ), which has deep technical reserves and is bound to major clients like Huawei, will fully benefit from domestic computing infrastructure; and Tongfei Co., Ltd. (300990.SZ), which leads in liquid cooling technology in fields such as energy storage, CNC equipment, and semiconductors, is actively expanding its data center liquid cooling clients. The main points of Guolian Minsheng Securities are as follows: Liquid cooling for data center heat dissipation is an important industrial trend Traditional air cooling is widely used for low power density data center heat dissipation tasks, but under the current trend of high power density in data centers, air cooling has become inadequate to meet the demand for efficient heat dissipation; at the same time, liquid cooling technology, with its advantages of high specific heat capacity and high thermal conductivity, as well as low noise, high stability, and small footprint, has become an important industrial trend as the power density of data centers increases. Technology and customer certification constitute industry competitive barriers Major listed companies in the liquid cooling infrastructure industry have generally maintained a high level of R&D investment in recent years, with the leading company Envicool's R&D expense CAGR from 2021 to 2024 at 32.6%, and its R&D expense ratio has remained above 6.5% since 2019, with a further upward trend in the past two years. Continuous iteration of products in terms of higher power and higher efficiency has created a relatively high dynamic technological barrier in the industry. Additionally, due to factors such as customer certification and procurement inertia, customers are generally cautious about introducing new suppliers. The penetration rate of liquid cooling in the data center field is still at a low level According to IDC, the expected server shipment volume in China in 2024 is about 4.55 million units, with liquid cooling server shipments around 230,000 units; from the perspective of server shipment quantity, the current penetration rate of liquid cooling is only about 5%. According to Zhang Peng, Vice President and CTO of Sugon, in an interview at the 2024 Data Center Standards Conference, the overall penetration rate of liquid cooling is currently less than 10%, but it is expected to rise to 30-40% in the next 3-5 years. The market space for liquid cooling infrastructure is expected to grow rapidly The bank expects the total power of domestic data centers from 2024 to 2027 to be 35.5GW, 43.5GW, 54.5GW, and 68.8GW, respectively; the newly added power of domestic data centers is expected to be 5.6GW, 7.9GW, 11.0GW, and 14.3GW, respectively; the 3-year CAGR for newly added data center power is 37.0%. Globally, the penetration rate of liquid cooling in the data center field is still at a low level, but due to a potentially more abundant supply of high-performance GPUs overseas, the increase in penetration rate is expected to be faster than that in China. The bank estimates that the global market space for data center liquid cooling infrastructure will be approximately 11.08 billion yuan in 2024, and is expected to grow to 26.34 billion yuan by 2027 Risk Warning: The shipment progress of high-performance computing chips is below expectations; industry competition is intensifying; capital expenditures from major clients are below expectations; there may be deviations in the estimation of industry market space