News from the AI & ML world
@blogs.nvidia.com
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NVIDIA's Blackwell platform is set to revolutionize data center cooling with a focus on water efficiency. The new platform introduces direct-to-chip liquid cooling, which dramatically reduces water consumption compared to traditional air-cooled systems. NVIDIA claims this innovative approach offers a 300x improvement in water efficiency. This is crucial as the increasing compute power required by AI and HPC applications is driving a global shift towards larger, more power-hungry data centers and AI factories.
This cooling solution addresses the escalating energy demands and environmental concerns associated with AI infrastructure. Historically, cooling has accounted for up to 40% of a data center's electricity consumption. The Blackwell platform's liquid cooling technology captures heat directly at the source, cycling it through a coolant distribution unit and liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger, before transferring it to a facility cooling loop. This method allows data centers to operate effectively at warmer water temperatures, reducing or eliminating the need for mechanical chillers in many climates, leading to significant cost savings and reduced energy consumption.
The NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and GB300 NVL72 systems, built on the Blackwell platform, utilize this direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology. Unlike evaporative or immersion cooling, this is a closed-loop system, meaning the coolant doesn't evaporate or require replacement due to loss from phase change, further conserving water. These rack-scale systems are designed to handle the demanding tasks of trillion-parameter large language model inference, making them ideal for running AI reasoning models while efficiently managing energy costs and heat. This advancement not only ensures optimal performance of AI servers but also promotes a more sustainable and environmentally friendly AI infrastructure.
ImgSrc: blogs.nvidia.co
References :
- NVIDIA Newsroom: Chill Factor: NVIDIA Blackwell Platform Boosts Water Efficiency by Over 300x
- blogs.nvidia.com: Chill Factor: NVIDIA Blackwell Platform Boosts Water Efficiency by Over 300x
- www.tomshardware.com: Nvidia aims to solve AI's water consumption problems with direct-to-chip cooling — claims 300X improvement with closed-loop systems
Classification:
- HashTags: #AI #NVIDIA #DataCenters
- Company: NVIDIA
- Target: Data Centers
- Product: Blackwell
- Feature: liquid cooling
- Type: AI
- Severity: Informative