In The Arena by TechArena - Valvoline Brings Liquid Cooling Power to AI Data Centers

Episode Date: November 15, 2025

From racing oils to data center immersion cooling, Valvoline is reimagining thermal management for AI-scale workloads. Learn how they’re driving density, efficiency, and sustainability forward.

Welcome to Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome in the arena. My name is Allison Klein, and it's another Data Insights episode, which means Janice Naurowski from Solidive is with me today. Welcome back. Janice, how are you doing? Hi, Alison. Thank you. Thanks for having. me back. So Data Insights goes deep into what's driving AI data centers. And we have a really exciting topic today. I'm really excited to unpack this. Why don't you tell us who's with us? Today we actually have Michael Morrison, director of new ventures for Valvalene. So we're going to take a different

approach today and not just talk about data storage. We're going to talk about the power behind cooling. So welcome to the show, Michael. Thank you both for having me. I'm really excited to be here. So why don't we just start, you know, Michael, you've never been on the program before. Can you just introduce yourself in your role at Valvely? Certainly. So I'm Michael Morrison, I'm director of new ventures of Balali Global. I've been with the company for about 16 years, served in various roles, data analytics, marketing. And then most recently, three or four years ago, we really started to look into new areas.

We separated from our retail auto care business that we previously had and started reinvesting back in new spaces beyond the typical automotive business that a lot of people are familiar with Vivalene. And so reading that team, you've decided to lead us in new areas like our liquid cooling solutions like we might be talking about today. I mean, everyone knows Vivalene, right? Vivaling is known for high performance oil industry applications and even changes in data center environments, as you just said. And you guys have placed your products squarely in the driver's seat for data center cooling, not just cars. How have you approached this market? Yeah. Well, you mentioned the words high performance.

which were synonymous with racing as our history goes back. We were one of the first oils, one of the first racing oils. And so shifting into anything else that's high performance like data center cooling was really a natural fit for us. And what really prompted that was heat. And so heat is really the focus of data centers more than maybe liberation would be in automotive. And so all of our scientists, engineers really saw a challenge in this space with rapidly

accelerated temperatures. and they started to investigate and really talk to the market and understand how Lavaline could jump in and help. And maybe one other detail, a lot of people don't know. As a primary partner of Cummins, who does a lot of backup power generation, we've been in data centers for a very long time. So this was an area we already had a little bit of a comfort zone. I've been to a lot of industry conferences lately

where liquid cooling vendors are present. And you can just throw the word dielectric into the conversation and people just start getting very excited. Dielectrics, obviously, are the liquids that go into liquid cooling. Can you talk to me a little bit about the chemistry behind cooling and how Valvaline has uniquely approached this topic? Yeah, absolutely. So when it comes to dilectric oil,

we're really talking about immersion cooling in particular. There's various forms of liquid cooling. Not all of their require dielectrids, but in this case, oil, naturally, some of the oils that are produced out there are completely dilectric. And so for us, we have access to great base oils and great additive packages that we can use to enhance a lot of different properties in that oil

to prevent issues with the servers from occurring. And so in immersion cooling, we're taking a server, we're literally dropping it in a tank full of dilectric oil. And so that's kind of innovative, kind of exciting. A lot of people love to see it in action. And for us, that's very commonplace. We're used to testing properties in our fluids

that would determine, does it conduct electricity? Does it transfer heat? What is the viscosity or flow rate of that oil? How efficient is it? And so for us, Dialetric, like you said, very exciting topic, but very core of what we do every day about it. Differentiation is really key, right, in a competitive market. But what else makes Alvolent approach to the data center cool and stand out

compared to some of the other options that are available today? Certainly. weight. And so in this industry, it's not about supplying oil. It's about the collaboration that happens. If you're a data center operator, one of the most important things you're going in immersion cooling is making sure that your fluid and your tanks and your servers are all compatible with each other. There are thousands of individual parts when you really start to break them down. And we want to ensure that the oil that we use in that environment is as compatible as it possibly can be to prevent issues. And so it's not fluid supply.

It is a fluid partnership, and I think that's where Babylon, something we've been doing for over 150 years now of creating really strong relationships. We're able to do that with our R&D team, our commercial team. Everybody is really focused on making sure that we're creating a very protective, safe and secure environment to these servers. When we talk about AI factories and we talk about this broad proliferation of technology, one of the things that I've heard is that we're moving from the megawatt era into the gigawatt era, which is hard to believe when you think about how data centers are being built out. When you're talking to customers and you're talking to them about deploying liquid cooling technologies to manage their thermal management, what do you see are the biggest challenges that they're facing in terms of thermal management holistically and why liquid is becoming more and more of a popular solution?

Certainly, the temperatures are what people think of when they think of thermal management, just handling the temperatures are created. That's not in itself the biggest problem in a modern data center environment. It's the density. And so we talk about high-density applications. AI helps lead to this. If we were talking the same number of chips,

CPUs and GPUs, you might need facilities that are 5, 10, 20 times the space. But what liquid cooling really enables you to do is put more chips into the same number of servers and ultimately more servers into the same amount of space. And so that density is really the biggest challenge that we talk to operators about. And our different approaches to liquid cooling can help them overcome that challenge.

Maybe this is a little bit redundant, but you mentioned, you know, energy efficiency and sustainability are top priorities for operators to some degree, right? But how do your specific solutions contribute to reducing power usage and environmental impact? You mentioned density and having more chips in a smaller amount of space, but what about reducing overall power and an environmental impact. Absolutely. And we don't claim that our fluids solve sustainability on their own, but you create a solution with liquid cooling that helps to do that.

And that opens a lot of different avenues per data center operator to have a reduced impact on the environment. Some of those areas could be water usage. If you move from air cooling, which can use a lot of water, we think of that not being liquid cooling, but they can use a lot of that. Certain environments in liquid cooling can actually use less. depending on how they're structured and set up.

In addition, power consumption, you don't need the large HVAC systems in a full liquid cooling environment that you would need for air handling, which reduces your operational expenses. Data center operators are always looking to cut the cost that aren't revenue generated, and the cooling does that. So liquid cooling allows them not only to improve their cost structure, but to have less of an impact on the environment at the same time. They mutually win together.

Now, you know what? It was just a few years ago. The place that I would expect to see liquid cooling companies is it super computing around the high-performance computing segment. Now it's emerging in hyperscale, in neocloud, and even in enterprise. Can you give me a sense of where we are when you look at the data center market as a whole in terms of adoption? And where do you think we're headed over the next few years?

Yeah. So I mentioned before there's multiple. methods of liquid cooling, right? There's one that is very established that is really beyond adoption and more into its growth mode already. They'll be called direct to chip cooling. And so what you're typically doing there is running a coolant or almost an anterfree like substance that you would have in an automobile. We're running that through a line and a cold plate. And that helps keep the individual chips cool and transfer their heat back out of the system. And so that method, like I said, rapidly growing, already well-established, proven.

A lot of the top manufacturers have warranted or supported that approach to liquid cooling, or they're even deploying it themselves. The other method that helps accomplish this movement from air cooling is immersion, like I was talking before, where we're taking the entire server, and that captures the heat from all of the parts and pieces, not just the chips. And that is a little bit more in its infancy. So there's a lot of the large hyperscalers, like you mentioned, are more. into proof of content mode, test mode, trying to validate all of the nuances of that technology.

They're not used to having large open tanks sitting in their data centers. And so even just understanding what is my day-to-day like, not only testing the performance metrics, but understanding what is my maintenance on a server it looks like. All of those things have to have operational procedures set, all of the nuances of running it in a normal setting and in an emergency environment. And so they're running through all of those protocols and tests now. And maybe over the next couple years, two to five years, somewhere in that range. And I would expect immersion because of its simplicity to start to accelerate and have similar adoption as to what we've seen out of direct-chip today.

Michael, you mentioned you've been, gosh, you've been at this for just over 15 years at Valvillin, which I think is awesome. But what about today's work that you're doing within the data center industry really excites you now and into the future? You can probably tell I'm very passionate about this. I really enjoy it. It's an exciting new area. If I picture what it would have been like maybe when people made the transition from steam engines and buggies or trains over to the automobile, that had to be incredibly revolutionary at the time. And a lot of change, a lot of side industries were built up because of that.

And the thought that we might be going through a world-changing technology like that with AI really gets me fired up. And so for us to play a role in that, just as we did with the automobile early on, it makes me excited for the company. It makes me excited personally. It makes me excited for the technology industry just because of all of the new potential that this technology brings us. Michael, when you were talking, I was thinking about the fact that we've called cars data centers on wheels. I think we're going to need to call data centers cars in big buildings or something.

I'm not sure there's so much confluence here in terms of core technologies. and quite fascinating to me. I am sure that our listeners were completely interested in what you've had to say today and want to continue the dialogue. Where can they engage with you and where can they learn more about the solutions that you talked about today? Certainly. So our website is a great place to start.

We've tried to build a resource there for people to come learn about liquid cooling. And so you can find a lot of the really deep scientific learning that we've shared about some of our experimentation with these flows that we've done there. You can find more about our products or more about liquid cooling in general. There is also a contact us form, and that brings you directly to our team. We would love to engage to share more. You can personally follow me on LinkedIn as well, and we like to share news as this industry continues to innovate. So really would love to connect even more deeply with the industry.

You can also find this at events. You mentioned a super computing conference, which is very popular in the industry. We'll be at that one and we'll be at many others, and we have a lot of collaborators that we deal with, that you'll see our products featured in their spaces as well throughout that show and others. Fantastic. Thank you so much for being on the program today. And with that, Janice, we wrap another edition of Data Insights. Thanks so much for the partnership as we explore the cutting edge of data center to edge technology. Thank you, Allison. Thank you, Michael. Thank you so much for having me.

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