S. 3269 — Liquid Cooling for AI Act of 2025

This section directs the Comptroller General of the United States to initiate, not later than 30 days after the date of enactment, a review of (A) research and development needs relating to liquid cooling utilization by data centers and (B) related market, technological, and regulatory conditions affecting that utilization. The review must evaluate or describe, among other elements: (1) research and development needs and costs and benefits for high-performance computing; (2) avoided energy costs, including deferred electric transmission upgrades; (3) increased compute capacity; (4) effects on computing performance, resiliency, and cybersecurity; (5) market trends and adoption rates over the past five years with future projections; (6) comparisons of single-phase and 2-phase direct-to-chip and immersion cooling across density bands for thermal performance, maintainability, safety, failure modes, and lifecycle costs; (7) coolant options, materials compatibility, corrosion control, biogrowth mitigation, filtration, de-aeration, fluid monitoring, heat transfer, and energy efficiency; and (8) reference architectures for liquid distribution by density band and cooling approach. As background, the section states congressional findings that data centers accounted for 4.4% of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2023 (up from 1.9% in 2018) and could reach 6.7% to 12.8% by 2028 due to AI growth, with liquid cooling needed to address heat from high-density AI servers; the section also defines related terms for purposes of the section, including "direct-to-chip liquid cooling," "immersion cooling," "heat-reuse," "single-phase," and "2-phase."