Dive Brief:
- Accelsius and iM Data Centers are collaborating to implement high-performance data center cooling solutions, the companies said Tuesday. The first installation is planned for iM’s new data center facility in Miami, set to open in the first quarter of 2025.
- The partnership aims to meet increasing demand for high-performance computing and AI workloads by integrating Accelsius’ NeuCool thermal simulation rack into iM’s modular data center infrastructure, according to a news release.
- The Miami deployment “will help reshape how data centers approach high-performance computing infrastructure with sustainability in mind,” Accelsius CEO Josh Claman said in the Nov. 19 statement.
Dive Insight:
With rapid growth in the demand for computing power, electricity demand from data centers could more than double over the next decade, the Conference Board said in May. A separate May report from the Electric Power Research Institute predicted a doubling of data centers’ electricity demand by 2030.
Experts say two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling solutions like NeuCool are significantly more efficient than single-phase liquid and air-cooling technologies. NeuCool has an up to 59% lower total cost of ownership and 50% energy savings over air cooling, which remains the dominant solution in older data centers, Claman said in an email.
A two-phase cooling solution developed by Marathon Digital Holdings, a publicly-traded Bitcoin miner, can reduce data center cooling costs by 60%, the company says.
News of Accelsius’ collaboration with iM Data Centers comes a week after Accelsius announced that it had raised $24 million in a funding round to support “international expansion, new innovative liquid cooling solutions and accelerated hiring across engineering, R&D, sales, marketing, manufacturing and operations.”
The NeuCool thermal simulation rack that Accelsius will showcase at iM’s Miami data center can support cost-effective testing of two standard configurations — up to 30 kilowatt and up to 50kW server racks — as well as customized racks up to 250 kW that use Accelsius’ two-phase, direct-to-chip cooling technology, the company said in October.
The system includes load simulation sleds that allow users to replicate the heat output of the latest high-performance chips to create realistic test environments that closely mirror their production in data center conditions. The latest data centers feature individual server racks capable of consuming over 100 kW of power, Accelsius said.
The Accelsius partnership “enables iM Data Centers to apply the most technologically advanced and efficient methods to support the most powerful [graphics processing unit] servers today and in the future,” iM Data Centers founder and CEO Michael Roark said in a statement.
The collaboration will support next-generation AI and high-performance computing workloads at the Miami data center, which spans 100,000 square feet and will initially offer 10 megawatts of power, with the potential to scale to 40 MW, Accelsius and iM said Tuesday.
Efficient cooling solutions are especially useful for data centers in places like Miami, which is known for high heat and humidity, Claman said. But iM Data Centers has been “proactive in their approach to high-density workloads … which is why they saw the benefit of two-phase, direct-to-chip liquid cooling to enable superior heat removal with extremely low electricity use, regardless of the geography,” he said.
The Miami deployment allows future iM clients to see how NeuCool systems work in a data center context and “gives them the opportunity to select NeuCool for their at-scale deployments,” Claman said. NeuCool delivers “the highest level of heat removal” — up to 2,200 watts per socket — which will benefit data center operators as “future generations of GPUs will require increasingly better heat removal to run learning and inference computations,” he added.
