energy costs by around 4 %, and at hyperscale that translates into significant savings. According to NVIDIA, this means a 50MW facility moving to liquid-cooled infrastructure can save over US $ 4m annually in cooling-related energy and water costs.
Vendor design adapts to chip-level power demands The ecosystem supplying this infrastructure has had to adapt at pace. Motivair, Schneider Electric’ s advanced cooling division, has worked alongside NVIDIA’ s product roadmap for close to a decade.
Richard Whitmore, President and CEO of Motivair, has watched the threshold shift from optional to essential.“ Once the watts per chip crossed a certain level, liquid cooling became mandatory,” Richard says.
He points to geography as the remaining variable determining how close a facility can get to eliminating mechanical cooling altogether.
“ In the right geographic location, with the right system design, you don’ t need any refrigeration equipment,” Richard says.“ You can just put big radiator coils outside and use the air temperature for all your cooling. It’ s incredibly efficient.”
datacentremagazine. com 79