Microsoft used AI to invent a safer coolant — and dunked a PC in it

Microsoft says it used its own agentic reasoning AI model to help develop and synthesize a new immersion fluid for PC cooling—and then confirmed that it worked by dunking a PC motherboard into a vat of it.

John Link, Microsoft’s principal program manager for product innovation, closed out Microsoft’s Build developer keynote by showing off how Microsoft innovated a new immersion cooling technology using Copilot AI without any PFAS (or what’s known as “forever chemicals”).

PC boards and server racks can be cooled by air, by water, or by connecting metal heat exchangers with fluid-filled tubing that thermally routes the heat of a processor to the outside world. Immersion cooling is an extreme example of this, which uses electrically non-conductive fluids that surround the entire board. Essentially, the entire board is submerged. Water can’t be used because it would short out the system, so PFAS can be used instead—but PFAS presents environmental and health hazards.

Link used what Microsoft calls Microsoft Discovery, an agentic research system. Agentic AI is Microsoft’s next big thing, and your one-on-one interactions with Copilot will soon give way to managing individual AIs that autonomously perform specialized tasks.

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According to Microsoft, the model uses both proprietary data as well as external research to try and develop relationships between the data. In Link’s demonstration, it used both a “Knowledge Base” agent as well as a specialized chemistry agent. The example tried to exclude any proposed molecules that would violate the PFAS conditions, and that fell within a certain dielectric range and boiling points.

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