Computing

Increasing Data Centers’ Efficiency With Better Power Conversion Chips

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Published

With the boom in cloud computing and AI data centers, the energy consumption of computing tasks is going through the roof, growing much quicker than the growth in energy supply or transmission capacity. This could put a hard upper limit on how much more computing capacity can be installed, with the building of new energy sources a lot slower and more difficult to solve quickly than previous chokepoints in the supply of AI chips and GPUs.

This is why any improvement in efficiency in data centers is important. A key part will be switching to specialized, more energy-efficient computing hardware, like TPUs, ASICs, and so on.

(You can read more about this topic in “Investing in AI Hardware: From CPUs to XPUs”).

Another possibility is improving the efficiency of the energy supply itself. Most data centers operate with a high-voltage power supply, which minimizes transmission losses and helps handle the tremendous amount of energy the entire data center needs.

But the computer chips themselves are much smaller and fragile, operating at lower voltages. So the power supply needs to be converted to a lower voltage, which is not a very efficient operation.

At least until now, as three researchers at the University of California might have discovered a new way to reduce voltage that would be perfect for the steep voltage drop between data center power supply and GPUs/AI chips. They published their findings in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications1, under the title “A hybrid piezoelectric resonator-based DC-DC converter”.

Reinventing Data Center Power Conversion

How Power Is Supplied To GPUs

Most modern data centers operate with a power supply distributed throughout the racks at 48V. It is much higher than the previously used standard of 12V. This change was driven by the growing demand for power from modern chips and the lack of space in the racks harboring them.

48V is simply more efficient and requires fewer power conversion components for converting the 120V AC grid supply into DC electricity usable by the silicon chips.

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Jonathan er en tidligere biokemisk forsker, der har arbejdet med genetisk analyse og kliniske forsøg. Han er nu en aktieanalytiker og finansforfatter med fokus på innovation, markedscykler og geopolitik i sin publikation The Eurasian Century.