The Register
Summary
Intel this week unveiled a $700 million sustainability initiative to try innovative liquid and immersion cooling technologies to the datacenter.
The project will see Intel construct a 200,000-square-foot "mega lab" approximately 20 miles west of Portland at its Hillsboro campus, where the chipmaker will qualify, test, and demo its expansive — and power hungry — datacenter portfolio using a variety of cooling tech.
Alongside the lab, the x86 giant unveiled an open reference design for immersion cooling systems for its chips that is being developed by Intel Taiwan. The chip giant is hoping to bring other Taiwanese manufacturers into the fold and it'll then be rolled out globally.
While the individual components and servers consume a substantial amount of power, keeping them cool accounts for upwards of 40 percent of a datacenter's energy consumption, he explained. "Simply reducing the energy consumption is a really big part of what liquid cooling and, more specifically, immersion cooling brings to the table."
Beyond, curbing energy consumption, these technologies offer several ancillary benefits. One is a substantial reduction in water usage, while another is that liquid cooling is just better than air at moving heat away, and can even be reused for things like district heating, Beran said.
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