Immersion Liquid Cooling Industry Boom Drives Skyrocketing Demand for Methyl Phenyl Silicone Oil, Domestic Materials Complete Full-Scenario Large-Scale Commercial Verification


      In June 2026, a large number of computing center construction projects across China have entered the peak period of commissioning and operation. Methyl phenyl silicone oil, the core heat dissipation medium for AI computing infrastructure, has recently seen explosive growth in market demand. The latest data obtained from industry surveys shows that in the first half of 2026, the domestic market shipment volume of methyl phenyl silicone oil increased by 127% year-on-year compared with the same period in 2025. Among them, the shipment growth rate of modified methyl phenyl silicone oil products specially customized for the immersion liquid cooling scenarios of AI data centers even reached 194%, completely breaking the long-term monopoly of overseas brands in the high-end liquid cooling medium field. This marks that domestic methyl phenyl silicone oil has officially completed full-scenario large-scale commercial application, covering everything from general industrial scenarios to core materials for high-end computing infrastructure.
      Methyl phenyl silicone oil is a special organosilicon fluid obtained by introducing part of phenyl groups onto the molecular main chain of dimethyl polysiloxane. Thanks to its unique molecular structure design, it perfectly integrates the low-temperature flexibility of methyl silicone oil with the high temperature resistance and radiation resistance of phenyl silicone oil, becoming one of the few fluid materials that can simultaneously cover the ultra-wide temperature range of -70°C to 300°C. Different from ordinary dimethyl silicone oil, the phenyl groups in methyl phenyl silicone oil significantly enhance the rigidity and thermal oxidative stability of the molecular chain, and at the same time improve the electrical insulation performance, radiation resistance and extreme environment tolerance of the product by orders of magnitude. For a long time in the past, most of the methyl phenyl silicone oil in the domestic market was concentrated in low-end general-purpose categories, which could only meet basic scenario requirements such as ordinary industrial lubrication and oil bath heat conduction. The core technology of high-end liquid cooling grade products has long been controlled by a small number of overseas enterprises. Not only was the procurement cost persistently high, but the core formula parameters could not be customized and adjusted according to the actual working conditions of domestic computing centers, which seriously restricted the large-scale promotion of China’s immersion liquid cooling industry.
      To meet the core heat dissipation requirements of high-density AI computing clusters, domestic scientific research teams and upstream and downstream partners in the liquid cooling industry have carried out 5 years of targeted technical research. Aiming at the special requirements of immersion liquid cooling scenarios, they have carried out precise optimization on the molecular structure of methyl phenyl silicone oil: by adjusting the random distribution ratio of phenyl groups on the polysiloxane main chain, the kinematic viscosity-temperature coefficient of the product is controlled at an extremely low level, ensuring that within the full operating temperature range of servers from -40°C to 120°C, the viscosity fluctuation of the medium does not exceed 15%, completely solving the industry pain point of sharp drop in fluidity of traditional cooling media during high and low temperature switching. Through deep removal of trace polar impurities and metal ions in the fluid, the volume resistivity of the product is increased to more than 1×10^15Ω·cm, and the breakdown voltage of the medium reaches 45kV/2.5mm, fully meeting the insulation safety requirements for live server motherboards to be directly immersed. Through special antioxidant formula modification, the acid value increase of methyl phenyl silicone oil after 5000 hours of thermal aging under long-term continuous operation at 85°C is less than 0.03mgKOH/g, which hardly causes any corrosion on common materials such as copper, aluminum and PCB boards of servers, and its material compatibility with all mainstream server components reaches 100%.
      At present, more than 70 large-scale computing center projects across China have completed the deployment and application of domestic liquid cooling grade methyl phenyl silicone oil, and the total installed scale of liquid-cooled servers that have been put into operation has exceeded 2.5 million units. Statistics of actual operation data show that the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of computing clusters using domestic methyl phenyl silicone oil as the immersion liquid cooling medium can be stably controlled below 1.09, far lower than the average level of 1.4-1.6 of traditional air-cooled data centers. The computing power density of a single server can be increased by more than 3 times. At the same time, the operating temperature of the server’s core chip is firmly controlled within 65°C, the long-term operating life of the chip is extended by 40%, and the overall energy consumption cost of the computing cluster is directly reduced by 35%. In the measured data of a super-large-scale AI large model training base in China, the H100 chip immersed in methyl phenyl silicone oil runs at full load for 90 consecutive days, the temperature fluctuation on the chip surface does not exceed 2°C, there is no local overheating and frequency reduction, and the training efficiency of the large model is 28% higher than that of the air-cooled cluster.
      In addition to the AI liquid cooling scenario, the application of methyl phenyl silicone oil in new energy, high-end manufacturing and other fields is also expanding rapidly. In the immersion liquid cooling energy storage system of the new generation energy storage power station, methyl phenyl silicone oil, as the direct cooling medium of the cells, can reduce the thermal runaway risk of the energy storage power station by more than 90%, completely solving the safety problem of excessive temperature difference between cells and easy thermal runaway in traditional air-cooled energy storage systems. In the aerospace field, radiation-modified methyl phenyl silicone oil has been applied to the damper of the attitude control system of the new generation remote sensing satellite. It has passed the 1500krad space gamma-ray irradiation test, and the viscosity change rate of the product after irradiation is less than 4%, fully meeting the long-life on-orbit operation requirement of more than 15 years. Industry associations predict that by 2027, the overall market size of methyl phenyl silicone oil in China will exceed 30 billion yuan, of which the proportion of liquid cooling special products will exceed 60%, making it one of the key core materials supporting the rapid development of China’s AI computing industry.