Dropbox Tech Blog Hack Week 2025: How these engineers liquid-cooled a GPU server
2025-08-27
9 min read
0
by
Hicham Badri,Appu Shaji,Craig Wilhite,Josh Clemm,Jason Shang,Artem Nabirkin,Dropbox Team,Ameya Bhatawdekar,Sean-Michael Lewis,Appu Shaji,Hicham Badri,Appu Shaji,Ranjitha Gurunath Kulkarni,Ameya Bhatawdekar,Gonzalo Garcia,Catie Keck
Endigest AI Core Summary
Dropbox engineers built a custom liquid cooling system for GPU servers during Hack Week 2025, winning the Learn Fast award for accelerating innovation in infrastructure.
- •The team assembled the system from scratch using radiators, pumps, reservoirs, tubing, manifolds, and sensors instead of a pre-built unit
- •Liquid cooling achieved 20–30°C lower operating temperatures under heavy stress tests compared to existing air-cooled production systems
- •Removing or slowing fans became possible since liquid cooling handled CPUs and GPUs directly, with minimal airflow still needed for DIMMs and network cards
- •The project is forward-looking: as next-gen GPU servers consume more power, air cooling may only support mid-range hardware, making liquid cooling infrastructure essential
- •Plans include expanding testing to multiple data center liquid cooling labs to prepare for AI workload demands
Tags:
#Culture
#AI
#Developers
#Infrastructure