Advanced Cooling Technologies will receive $1.1 million through two subcontracts with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
The funding is part of ARPA-E’s Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems program, or COOLERCHIPS, which seeks to develop high-performance, energy-efficient cooling systems for data centers, according to a news release Monday. The COOLERCHIPS program, which began two years ago, allocated $82 million through 2022 and 2023 to promote the development of data center energy efficiency projects.
Data center cooling can be energy intensive. It may account for up to 33% to 40% of overall data center energy use and may be “consuming hundreds of billions of gallons of fresh water per year,” according to a program sheet.
Less than half of data center professionals surveyed by AFCOM reported that their current cooling solutions meet all tier requirements, with 35% saying they are compelled to make adjustments because they persistently run out of cooling capacity, according to a State of the Data Center Industry report released February.
The COOLERSHIPS program aims to reduce total cooling energy use to less than 5% of a data center’s typical IT load at any time in any U.S. location for a high-density system, per the program sheet.
It plans to do that by promoting technologies that can dramatically reduce the thermal resistance of heat rejection, allowing for coolants to exist at temperatures much closer to the operating temperatures of the latest generation chips, ARPA-E says, noting that this will result in more efficient heat removal from the facility.
ACT was selected as a subcontractor to Intel and a collaborator with Purdue University to develop two-phase immersion cooling for high-power server devices up to 2 kilowatts, per the release. ACT is also subcontracting with the University of Missouri to develop a scalable dual-mode hybrid two-phase loop for data center cooling that will provide advantages over existing phase-change processes, per the release.
Additional organizations participating in the COOLERCHIPS program include HP, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Nvidia, as well as the University of California-Davis, University of Florida, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Maryland andUniversity of Texas at Arlington.
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