From June 22 to 26, ISC High Performance 2026—the world’s most influential flagship summit for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence—kicked off in Hamburg, Germany. Centered on the theme “Connecting the Dots”, this year’s conference focused on the integrated evolution of HPC, AI and quantum computing.
SLiquid showcased C8000 V3.0, the world’s first megawatt-scale phase-change immersion liquid cooling full rack and integrated infrastructure solution, drawing widespread attention on-site.
Cooling and Power Supply Emerge as New Industry Priorities
Boasting a 41-year legacy, ISC has long served as a bellwether for the computing power sector. A striking shift at this year’s show lies in the surging spotlight on liquid cooling and power supply technologies, which have evolved from auxiliary supporting facilities into core considerations for system architecture design.
In its pre-show article Rethinking Cooling Solutions, ISC officials stated plainly that single racks GPU clusters now commonly hit 80 to 120 kilowatts. When AI training workloads run at full capacity, an increasing number of data centers hit bottlenecks in cooling and power delivery long before reaching their computational limits. A quote from the paper has been widely cited: “If you can’t cool it, you can’t run it.” It lays bare the industry’s core predicament in 2026: as air cooling hits its physical limits and single-rack power ratings advance toward the megawatt threshold, thermal management is no longer merely a concern for data center facility engineers—it has become an indispensable challenge for system architects.
Parallel to this trend, next-generation power supply technologies including high-voltage direct current (HVDC) and 800V power architectures are undergoing rapid iteration. Deep integration of liquid cooling and high-voltage power supply is emerging as the new standard for intelligent computing center infrastructure. SLiquid’s C8000 V3.0 is engineered precisely to address this industry shift.
Turning the “Megawatt-Scale” Concept into Deliverable Products
SLiquid officially launched the C8000 V3.0 as early as April 8 this year, with technical specifications already hitting milestones that international competitors have only scheduled for their 2027 technology roadmaps. At the ISC exhibition booth, the flagship performance metrics of the C8000 V3.0 once again captured the gaze of global attendees.
Zhang Peng, CTO of SLiquid, commented: “The C8000 V3.0 is not an incremental upgrade of individual components, but a systematic overhaul spanning five core dimensions: thermal dissipation, power supply, intelligent control, mechanical structure and cross-hardware compatibility.” This vision aligns perfectly with the ISC 2026 theme. As HPC, AI and quantum computing converge, infrastructure capable of linking computing, storage, networking, cooling and power into a unified ecosystem will form the foundational backbone for the next era of computing.
SLiquid Solutions Take Center Stage on the Global Arena
A total of 188 exhibitors from 26 countries participated in ISC 2026. Amid the rapid global uptake of liquid cooling in data centers, leading overseas supercomputing hubs, AI research labs and cloud service providers are all searching for scalable, deployable liquid cooling solutions.
SLiquid’s solutions on the global stage signifies far more than superior technical parameters. More crucially, it represents a proven industrial model: phase-change immersion liquid cooling paired with HVDC direct power supply and full-chain intelligent control. This foundational capability has been refined through extensive deployment. The solution transforms data centers from inflexible fixed loads on power grids into dynamically adjustable energy resources, offering highly valuable resolution pathways for high-density computing scenarios worldwide.
ISC 2026 sent an unambiguous industry signal: the era of air cooling is drawing to a close, and liquid cooling paired with high-efficiency power delivery stands as the core component of new intelligent computing infrastructure. While global industry players are still grappling with the question of “how to implement liquid cooling effectively”, SLiquid has already delivered mature, ready-to-deploy answers ahead of schedule.
