New AI infrastructure achieves 45°C breakthrough

The company says the Rubin generation of its AI infrastructure is the world’s first to achieve 100% liquid cooling. Each component in the infrastructure is cooled by liquid in a closed loop, with no fans anywhere in the system.

Director of data center cooling and infrastructure at NVIDIA, Ali Heydari, says the new design for AI factories has zero water consumption.

“We have eliminated massive amounts of power usage and pretty much all water usage,” he says.

“With dry-cooler-based designs, it’s a closed-loop system with no evaporative water cooling – outside of maybe 1% of the year when we might need chillers in some climates.”

The company says the tech works by capturing heat directly at the chip and transporting it through liquid loops operating at much higher temperatures, allowing outdoor dry coolers to reject heat efficiently while significantly reducing mechanical cooling requirements and facility water consumption. The cooling liquid is re-circulated in a closed loop, so no new water is consumed.

Cooling can account for up to 40% of a data centre’s energy usage. According to NVIDIA, raising chiller plant temperatures by just one degree can cut cooling energy costs by about 4%. As an example, it claims a 50-megawatt hyperscale facility can save over US$4 million annually in cooling-related energy and water costs by moving to liquid-cooled infrastructure.

The benefit of the new technology is that it is not as impacted by ambient temperatures. It also means less noise and equipment is needed. Servers that previously occupied six rack units now only need two.

The advanced cooling division of Schneider Electric, Motivair, has worked alongside NVIDIA’s product roadmap for nearly a decade. President and CEO, Richard Whitmore, says in the right geographic location, with the right system design, you don’t need any refrigeration equipment.

“You can just put big radiator coils outside and use the air temperature for all your cooling. It’s incredibly efficient,” he says.

Geography does still matter – but NVIDIA says that even in warmer climates, the shift toward 45°C coolant moves operators significantly closer to that chiller-less ideal.

The new model also also opens the door for waste heat recovery, where waste heat can be used for purposes outside of the data centre itself.

As AI and the digital workload demands grow, so too does the energy cost to run the hardware. NVIDIA believes this new cooling technology is “one of the most important tools the industry has to close that gap”.

Feature image courtesy of NVIDIA.

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