IDC: China liquid-cooling server revenue up 153.1% in H1

On November 11, 2026, IDC released a report stating that China's liquid-cooled server market has expanded rapidly over the past two years. According to IDC's China Liquid-Cooled Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the Chinese liquid-cooled server market grew 153.1% year over year in the first half of 2026, and the five-year forecast puts the CAGR of shipment volume at nearly 49%.

The report attributes the market's growth to the compute demand generated by AI. Internet companies are currently the largest source of procurement, accounting for 65.6% of China's liquid-cooled server market; telecom operators and IT services are also major application areas. Some traditional-industry customers have not adopted liquid cooling yet, mainly because their existing workloads are general-purpose computing tasks that air cooling can handle, though these industries are actively exploring liquid-cooling solutions suited to their own business characteristics.

The report also highlights a shift in how buyers source systems. An increasing number of high-density compute projects no longer select servers on a per-unit basis. Instead, compute nodes, inter-node connectivity, power distribution, and in-rack liquid-cooling infrastructure are specified, configured, and delivered as one integrated system. The rack is evolving from a physical container in the data center into the unit of delivery for compute procurement. Vendors now hand over a fully integrated system, while data centers receive not a collection of individual servers but a load with explicit requirements for power, cooling, and interfacing.