Dive Brief:
- Amazon Web Services on Monday announced new data center components designed to support advanced, high-power chips and existing infrastructure.
- The improvements include simplified electrical and mechanical systems. The simplified systems can reduce the potential number of racks impacted by electrical issues by 89%, driving reliability and reducing overall energy consumption, according to a news release. The new modular components are designed to support liquid-to-chip cooling systems and high-density AI workloads while being “flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of other hardware types,” AWS said.
- “These data center capabilities represent an important step forward with increased energy efficiency and flexible support for emerging workloads,” Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of infrastructure services at AWS, said in a statement. “But what is even more exciting is that they are designed to be modular, so that we are able to retrofit our existing infrastructure for liquid cooling and energy efficiency to power generative AI applications and lower our carbon footprint.”
Dive Insight:
The growing demand for data centers, especially high-intensity facilities that can handle the power required for generative AI applications, comes as Amazon works to reduce its carbon emissions and meet internal and external decarbonization targets, including reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. The company cut its absolute carbon emissions 3% year over year in 2023 and reduced its carbon intensity by 13% in that time.
In its 2023 Sustainability report, released in July, Amazon attributed the overall decline in its absolute carbon emissions to an 11% year-over-year decrease in scope 2 emissions, or emissions from electricity, and a 5% decrease in scope 3 emissions, or indirect and supply chain emissions. Its increased use of renewable energy-sourced electricity and its purchase of additional environmental attributes such as renewable energy credits contributed to the reduction in its scope 2 emissions, the company’s report states.
.The two most important ways Amazon can lower electricity-related carbon emissions are by improving energy efficiency and transitioning to carbon-free energy, according to Amazon’s sustainability report. These strategies include on-site renewables, refrigerants with low global warming potential and alternative fuels for backup power sources and data center cooling, it says.
With electricity passing through multiple conversion and distribution systems before reaching IT equipment in a data center, each step naturally introduces inefficiency, energy loss and potential failure points, AWS said in the release.
“We saw an opportunity to really pull those things apart and simplify … the whole system. We assume that any component in the data center is going to fail,” Kevin Miller, vice president of global data centers at AWS, said in an interview. “And our goal then is to make sure that an individual component failure can never bubble up to become something that’s customer-visible.”
The new components include upgraded cooling systems that are expected to reduce mechanical energy consumption by up to 46% compared with its previous design during peak cooling conditions, without increasing water use on a per-megawatt basis, according to the release. The systems will integrate with both air and liquid cooling, “to provide maximum performance and efficiency at the lowest cost, whether running traditional workloads or AI models,” AWS said.
“We are already starting to deploy some of that liquid cooling capacity, but we also know … that we need to be flexible in meeting the specific needs of different generations over time,” Miller said. “It's going to be a transition where we're going to continue to support both air and liquid in our buildings for a long time, and we need to have components that are very modular, so that we can right size [systems] and really make it efficient for just the amount of liquid capacity we need.”
“For our customers and for others, it can seem like a data center is a data center,” Miller added. “The reality is that they are very different.”
A new power shelf will efficiently deliver data center power throughout racks, reducing conversion losses. AWS said the engineering innovations it has developed in its power delivery system will support a six-fold increase in rack density over the next two years and another three-fold increase in the future. Taken together, the energy-efficient system design and power delivery systems will enable AWS to deliver 12% more compute power per site for customer workloads, it said.
Design changes include a new single-sided cooling system, a reduction in cooling equipment and the introduction of liquid cooling capabilities, AWS said. Additionally, backup generators can run on renewable diesel, reducing GHG emissions by up to 90% over the fuel’s lifecycle when compared with fossil diesel. A control system is also being rolled out across AWS’ electrical and mechanical devices that can standardize monitoring, alarming and operational sequences, AWS said.
