Research|Power and Liquid Cooling: OCP 2026 Sharpens Power Deployment Timelines; Single-Phase Cooling Has Room to Improve

Core Insights

1. In power and liquid cooling, there were no major architectural changes at OCP this year; the movement is in specs, timing and detail.
2. The NVIDIA and AMD keynotes restated existing roadmaps, and AMD’s only new launch, the Helion agentic rack, is a product-line extension rather than an architectural change.
3. The break-out sessions did show finer changes: NVIDIA wants SST deployment readiness by 2028, earlier than investors generally expect; the runway for single-phase cold plates remains intact and should stay mainstream through 2030; capacitors inside the PSU may squeeze out the CBU before it ever scales; and the ±400 V versus 800 V argument has converged on voltage-to-ground, so tray-side specs are compatible and suppliers are not facing two product lines.
4. We attended the 2026 OCP Global Summit in San Jose from October 12 to 15. Our note on power and liquid cooling below draws on learnings from the show floor and 95 sessions, 22 of which we attended in person.
5. We identify three key themes in power and liquid cooling and discuss the debates surrounding each theme, before ending the note with a roundup of discussions with investors as well as some photographs from the show floor.