NVIDIA has announced its new plan to reduce power usage in data centers that process massive amounts of data or train AI models with liquid-cooled graphics cards.
The company announced at Computex that it is introducing a liquid-cooled version of the A100 computing card. It says it uses 30% less energy than the air-cooled version.
NVIDIA also promises to offer more liquid-cooled server cards in the future. And she hinted at bringing the technology to other areas, such as systems inside vehicles that have to be kept cool inside.
According to the company, reducing the power needed to perform complex calculations might have a significant impact. NVIDIA says data centers use more than 1% of the world’s electricity, and 40% of that is due to cooling.
Reducing this by regarding a third can be significant, although graphics cards are only part of the equation. CPUs, storage, and network equipment also consume power and also need cooling.
Nvidia claims that liquid-cooled GPU acceleration systems are significantly more efficient than CPU servers for AI and other high-performance tasks.
There’s a reason liquid cooling is so popular in high-performance use cases, as liquids absorb heat better than air.
It’s relatively easy to move the hot liquid somewhere else to cool it, compared to trying to cool the air in an entire building or increase the airflow to certain components on the card that release all the heat.
NVIDIA promises 30% less power
In addition to energy efficiency, liquid-cooled cards have another advantage over their air-cooled counterparts because they take up less space, which means you can fit more of them in the same space.
Nvidia’s push to reduce energy use through liquid cooling comes at a time when many companies are considering how much energy their servers use.
While data centers aren’t the only source of carbon emissions and pollution for big tech companies, they are part of the problem.
Critics point out that balancing energy use through credits does not have the same effect as reducing consumption. Companies like Microsoft have experimented with submerging servers in liquid. It has also put entire data centers in the ocean in an effort to use less energy and water.
The company markets its liquid-cooled GPUs as a server core, rather than as a high-end solution.
The company may also try to make liquid cooling more popular by incorporating liquid cooling into the reference designs of its gaming-focused cards.
The company did not say any plans to do so. It has only stated that it plans to support liquid cooling in high-performance data center GPUs for the foreseeable future.
It would also not be surprising if the company announced the RTX 5000 series that comes with liquid cooling. Namely, NVIDIA cards continue to consume more power (the 3090 Ti can draw up to 450 watts).
For data center-focused cards, the company says carriers will integrate liquid-cooled cards into their servers later this year. The A100 cards are also supposed to arrive in the third quarter of this year.
