Faster, hotter chips need smarter cooling solutions
The tipping point for mass market liquid-cooled data servers is imminent.
The quest for better technologies to cool data centers reached new urgency this year, driven by the popularity of data-hungry artificial intelligence and IoT applications like generative content and precision medicine.
The time is right for a set of new liquid cooling technology applications that before now may not have been economically viable. They are Precision Immersion Liquid Cooling and Direct-to-Chip Negative Pressure Liquid Cooling.
Why are these technologies so relevant today? Workloads such as AI, big data and high-performance computing require chips that are increasingly dense – and hot. Faster, hotter chips need smarter cooling solutions.
Next-level cooling solutions
Avnet Integrated Solutions is intimately familiar with these trends and the growing problems presented by limited natural resources where data centers and edge computing are concerned. The pressure to reduce energy consumption, space constraints, water usage restrictions – all are coming together to move us to next-level cooling solutions.
The latest chips have a thermal design power (TDP) of 400W or more. High-power graphics processing units (GPUs) are now being used for compute. And according to Data Center Dynamics (and other sources), data centers consume 3-5% of the world’s energy. The U.S. Department of Energy has shared that data centers account for 2% of total electricity consumption in the U.S. and data center cooling accounts for up to 40% of data center usage overall.
What all of this means is that we must bring to market better ways to keep compute and storage cool. Current air-cooling technologies just can’t keep up.
Tomorrow’s data centers will deploy primordial enemies – fluid and electronics – in new ways to protect our environment. They’ll reduce the power consumption of data centers and recycle one of our most precious resources: water.
Additional reading
The server industry is increasingly focused on finding more efficient ways to cool data centers.
- Liquid Cooling for Data Centers and Edge Computing | Schneider Electric USA (se.com)
- Iceotope delivers KUL RAN – the latest in sustainable, serviceable and scalable telco edge server solutions, developed with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel
- Chilldyne Receives ARPA-E Grant | Chilldyne
- 4 critical insights for ordering data center liquid cooling systems
- COOLERCHIPS funded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy sets targets for reducing the energy needed to cool a typical data center.
- Analysts forecast dramatic market growth for data center liquid cooling