Hybrid Air and Liquid Cooling Patents: Leaders & White Space 2026
- Filings nearly doubled between 2021 and 2024 (+122%), yet no single assignee holds more than a slice of the field — the leader accounts for a small share of the 1,170 records in scope.
- 42.8% of records sit in H05K (printed circuits & assemblies), while refrigeration-cycle and heat-exchanger-detail classes each stay under 9% — claim density is uneven across the stack.
- The ranked leaders' combined top 10 covers only 24.4% of all records, leaving a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants still active in recent years.
Filing growth compares 2021 (45 records) with 2024 (100) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 1,170 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
Hybrid air and liquid cooling in racks describes systems that combine conventional air cooling with liquid cooling loops — rear door heat exchangers, partial liquid cooling retrofits, and staged deployments that leave a residual fraction of heat load on air. The search scope in this dataset pulls records that discuss fraction, residual air cooling, containment, airflow balance, staged deployment or power usage effectiveness alongside the core cooling terms, which concentrates the corpus on mixed-mode deployments rather than pure liquid immersion or pure air systems.
The 1,170 records span filings from 2015 through mid-2026, with receiving offices led by the United States, followed by China, the European Patent Office and the WIPO PCT route. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so filing counts for 2025 and 2026 understate actual activity and should not be read as a slowdown.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 1,170 records: how filing activity has moved year over year, and how it distributes across IPC subclasses.
Filing trend, 2017–2026
Filings rose from 34 in 2017 to a peak of 127 in 2023, and grew 122% between 2021 (45) and 2024 (100) — the last year in this range treated as complete. The 2026 figure (13) is a partial year and should be read as an in-progress count, not a decline.
Technology composition by IPC subclass
H05K (printed circuits & assemblies) carries 42.8% of the 1,170 records, well ahead of G06F (13.7%) and H10W (9.6%). Heat-exchange apparatus (F28D, 8.6%) and heat-exchanger details (F28F, 4.7%) trail behind chip- and board-level classes, suggesting most claim activity sits closer to the electronics package than the mechanical cooling loop itself. Records can carry multiple classes, so these shares sum to more than 100%.
Shares are the percentage of the 1,170 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Hybrid Air and Liquid Cooling in Racks with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about hybrid air and liquid cooling in racks and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaMost-cited records and a recent representative filing
Liquid cooling architecture for high-performance datacenters and optimization methods for any cooling architecture
A method, system, and computer program product for optimizing a liquid cooling architecture for a datacenter are provided. Operational parameters corresponding to a datacenter and a plurality of server units to be mounted in a rack within the datacenter are received. Groups of one or more server units from among the plurality of server units are determined based on the operational parameters. The server units are caused to be mounted in the rack based on the determined groups, and a group of server units is connected to a coolant distribution unit.Filed by The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois; published 2026-08-06.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US6775137B2 | Method and apparatus for combined air and liquid cooling of stacked electronics components | 375 |
| 2 | US20040100770A1 | Method and apparatus for combined air and liquid cooling of stacked electronics components | 254 |
| 3 | US20030168439A1 | Wafer stage for wafer processing apparatus and wafer processing method | 214 |
| 4 | US5704416A | Two phase component cooler | 211 |
| 5 | US6924981B2 | Method for combined air and liquid cooling of stacked electronics components | 205 |
| 6 | US20110059355A1 | High-energy metal air batteries | 165 |
| 7 | US20090126909A1 | System and method for facilitating cooling of a liquid-cooled electronics rack | 159 |
| 8 | US20090133866A1 | Hybrid air and liquid coolant conditioning unit for facilitaating cooling of one or more electronics racks of… | 155 |
| 9 | US20090194329A1 | Methods for forming wellbores in heated formations | 153 |
| 10 | US4955205A | Method of conditioning building air | 147 |
Citation counts favour older filings simply because they have had more time to accumulate citations inside a searched corpus — treat this as a signal of influence on later work, not of current commercial importance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three read-outs of the same dataset, each pointing at a different practical question: how fast the field is moving, where claim density sits, and how concentrated ownership is.
Activity accelerated sharply through 2023–2024
Filings grew from 45 in 2021 to 100 in 2024, with a peak of 127 in 2023. That is a genuine acceleration in a mature-looking field, not noise — and it happened while ownership stayed fragmented, meaning the growth is coming from new entrants as much as incumbents.
Board- and package-level claims dominate the corpus
H05K (printed circuits & assemblies) covers 42.8% of the 1,170 records, nearly three times the next class. Mechanical heat-exchanger classes (F28D, F28F) sit far lower, which points to where new claim space is comparatively less crowded.
No single filer dominates the field
The top 5 assignees combined account for 16.8% of the 1,170 records, and the top 10 for 24.4%. That leaves the large majority of filings spread across a long tail of entities filing in smaller volumes — a field still open to new claim positions rather than one locked up by a handful of incumbents.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to hybrid air and liquid cooling in racks, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the gate sits
The assignee ranking covers 100 companies returned by the data endpoint, counted by patent family. It is not a top-50 or top-100 cut of a larger list — it is the full ranking the dataset returns.
A clear leader, but not a dominant one
The leading assignee holds 63 of the 1,170 records — meaningfully ahead of fifth place at 27 — but still well short of the kind of dominance that would close off the field to new filers.
A steep drop after the top five
Fifth place holds 27 records and tenth place holds 16, a fast fall-off that signals a shallow group of established filers rather than a deep bench of repeat players.
Momentum has shifted away from the earlier leaders
Several of the historically active assignees show zero filings in the latest year, including two with a -100% year-on-year change, while at least one assignee continues filing at a modest but positive pace. Recency here should be read cautiously given the 18-month publication lag.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Perstorp AB | 6 | — |
| International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) | 0 | — |
| Haldor Topsoe A/S | 0 | — |
| Dell Products L.P. | 0 | -100% |
| OVH | 0 | — |
| Inspur Suzhou Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. | 0 | -100% |
| Intel Corporation | 0 | — |
| Vertiv Corp. | 0 | -100% |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to a field with rising filing activity, uneven claim density across the stack, and no dominant owner — three separate reasons to look closer before deciding where to file.
Map claim density before drafting
Check where a proposed claim sits relative to the H05K-heavy core versus the thinner mechanical heat-exchanger classes, so drafting effort goes where the white space actually is.
Explore the IPC breakdown in Eureka →Track the recent-momentum shifts
Several early leaders have gone quiet in the latest year while other filers keep moving — worth watching before assuming the current ranking will hold.
Monitor assignee activity in Eureka →Read the most-cited prior art directly
The most-cited records in this set date back over a decade; understanding what they actually claim clarifies what later filings had to design around.
Open the cited-patent table in Eureka →Common questions about this landscape
It covers systems that combine air cooling with a liquid loop inside the same rack or datacenter, rather than pure air-cooled or pure immersion designs. Typical examples include rear door heat exchangers, partial liquid cooling retrofits added to an existing air-cooled row, and staged deployments where only a fraction of the heat load moves to liquid while the rest stays on air. This dataset specifically targets records that discuss that residual air fraction, containment or airflow balance alongside the cooling method, which is why the corpus skews toward mixed-mode systems rather than fully liquid designs.
The leading assignee holds 63 of the 1,170 records in scope, with a fast drop-off to 27 records at fifth place and 16 at tenth. The top 5 assignees combined account for 16.8% of all records, and the top 10 for 24.4%, which means roughly three-quarters of the filings sit outside the most active ten filers. That is a fragmented field rather than one controlled by a small group of incumbents, and it has stayed that way even as overall filing volume has grown.
Filings grew from 45 in 2021 to 100 in 2024, a 122% increase, with the single highest year so far being 2023 at 127. The lower counts shown for 2025 and 2026 are not evidence of a slowdown — patent publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the most recent one to two years in any filing trend are always undercounted until later data catches up. Based on the complete years available, the trend through 2024 points upward, not down.
Printed circuits and assemblies (IPC class H05K) account for 42.8% of the 1,170 records, making it by far the most heavily claimed area, ahead of digital data processing (G06F, 13.7%) and H10W (9.6%). Heat-exchange apparatus and heat-exchanger detail classes sit lower, at 8.6% and 4.7% respectively. Because records can carry multiple IPC classes, these figures do not sum to 100%, but the gap does show that claim activity concentrates closer to the electronics package than to the mechanical cooling hardware.
The clearest signal is the gap between the heavily claimed board- and chip-level classes and the comparatively thin mechanical heat-exchanger classes such as F28D and F28F, which sit under 9% of records each. Sub-areas like residual air-fraction control logic, rear door heat exchanger retrofit kits, and coolant distribution unit failover mechanisms show up in the search terms but do not dominate the classification data, suggesting room for new claims. Anyone considering filing there should still check the most-cited prior art directly, since some of that space is anchored by older, heavily cited patents.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
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Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.