How Alibaba’s Immersion Liquid‑Cooled Server Clusters Achieve Near‑Ideal PUE of 1.0

On April 5, Alibaba Technology confirmed via its official Weibo that the “Kirin” project is an industry‑first immersion liquid‑cooling server cluster, using liquid instead of air to cool servers and achieving a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) close to the theoretical limit of 1.0.

The Weibo post described the rooftop container filled with black metal boxes bearing the Alibaba logo, showing internal cables, copper tubes and high‑density server nodes under transparent glass.

Project leader Chi Ping explained that Alibaba has developed a complete immersion liquid‑cooling solution, including new materials, server architecture, and a monitoring system, and has already deployed the technology in its own data centers and Alibaba Cloud services.

Immersion cooling offers superior heat removal, eliminates fans and vibration, improves component reliability, and dramatically reduces energy consumption, supporting high‑frequency computing and green data‑center initiatives.

Alibaba’s previous green‑data‑center efforts, such as deep‑lake water cooling and natural air cooling, achieved annual PUEs below 1.3 and 1.25 respectively; the new immersion solution pushes PUE toward the ideal 1.0.