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As power demand in data centers rises, technology companies are looking for ways to reduce electricity use where they can. Cooling is an obvious place to start, as it can account for about 40% of a data center’s energy consumption. According to To Mackenzie.
Most data centers are cooled by blowing cold air through their servers. The problem is that air is an inefficient medium for heat transfer. That’s why companies like Amazon, which is investing heavily in energy-intensive AI servers, have been so transformation For liquid cooling.
One startup, based in Ireland Nexalosargues that the hot water approach is not only more efficient, but also produces waste heat that is actually useful to other industries.
The core of Nexalus’ liquid cooling systems uses what’s known as direct-to-chip liquid cooling, where a heat sink on top of the CPU or GPU is attached to facilitate the flow of coolant. Unlike some other designs, it does not use tiny channels to direct the flow of liquid through the cooling pad. Instead, it pumps liquid through small holes directed at the cooling plate, much like fire hoses direct water onto a fire. These tiny jets direct the fluid to the hottest spots on the chip, allowing the system to operate at lower pressure. Tony Robinson, chief technology officer, said the company could design the small plane to suit different segments.
Nexalus then encloses the entire server inside a box that fits into the space of a regular 1U rack. Inside the sealed box, other components of the server are cooled using fans, while heat exchangers on the exhaust side extract heat from the air so it can be reused. The fluid is mostly water and a little propylene glycol, the same compound used in car radiators. The hot fluid is then pumped out of the enclosure and cooled in a heat exchanger, which can then vent the heat to the air or transfer it to another loop connected to a building or industrial user.
A liquid cooling setup allows more servers to be packed into a data center, saving real estate and construction costs. It also has the ability to reduce water use, which many data centers use for air conditioning.
This still leaves the question of what to do with the excess heat. Today, most of it is vented to the air. But Nixalos believes it could help companies turn that waste heat into a potential moneymaker by allowing them to sell it to industrial users and district heating — or even use it to offset their utility bills.
“We’re not saying we’re giving people power, but we’re unlocking more power,” Ken O’Mahony, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. “If a home that gets hot water from us is not using the electrical system to heat the water, the grid itself now has more energy to distribute.”
It may seem counter-intuitive, but hot water can be used for cooling as long as it is colder than the thing it is trying to cool. Burst heat pumps in residential and commercial buildings work on this very principle. Most data centers generate heat, but it’s usually not hot enough to be useful to anyone. Nexalus believes that by using hot water, it can change that while reducing electricity consumption by 35%, O’Mahony said.
To deliver heat to other customers, Nexalus works with Munters, which makes HVAC systems for data centers. To harvest heat from servers, the startup has worked with Dell and now HPE, the company exclusively told TechCrunch, to make sure its liquid cooling systems are easy-to-use alternatives to air cooling. It sells systems directly or through integration partners between Dell and HPE.
O’Mahony envisions smaller data centers in cities to take advantage of existing district heating schemes, or reuse heat within a building if servers occupy one or two floors of a skyscraper. Larger data center operators may partner with industrial companies such as food manufacturers, which need heat to power their operations.
“It’s hard to believe that over time, with this amount of energy, it wouldn’t make economic sense to build a district heating system to coincide with food production or to capture carbon,” Robinson said.
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