Nvidia turns to liquid cooling to reduce big tech’s energy use

Image: Nvidia

Liquid-cooled graphics cards are the new plan for reducing the energy use of data centers. The company announced that it is introducing a liquid-cooled version of its A 100 compute card, which consumes 30 percent less power than the air-cooled version. It's already got more liquid-cooled server cards on its roadmap, and hints at bringing the tech to other applications like in-car systems that need to keep cool. Even with liquid cooling, the recent recall for overheating chips shows how difficult that can be.

Data centers use over one percent of the world's electricity, and 40 percent of that is down to cooling, according to the company. It's worth noting that graphics cards are only one part of the equation, and that cooling and power draw are also part of the equation. Liquid cooling is claimed to be more efficient than a single processor on high- performance tasks.

Image: Nvidia

Liquid-cooling is popular in high- performance use cases because it absorbs heat better than air, according to Asetek, a major manufacturer of water cooling systems. It's easy to transfer warm liquid to another place so it can cool off, compared to trying to cool down the air in an entire building or increase the flow of air on a card that is dumping out all the heat.

Liquid-cooled cards take up less room than air-cooled ones, meaning you can fit more of them in the same amount of space.

At a time when a lot of companies are considering the amount of energy their server use, Nvidia's push to lower energy use via liquid-cooling comes at a time. While data centers are not the only source of carbon emissions for big tech, they are a piece of the puzzle that can be ignored. Microsoft has been experimenting with submerging server in liquid completely and putting entire data centers in the ocean to use less energy and water.

It isn't the norm for data centers to have liquid-cooling solutions like those from Nvidia. The liquid-cooled graphics cards are being marketed as a server solution rather than a bleeding-edge solution.

This raises the question of whether we could see a liquid-cooling version of the reference designs for the gaming-focused cards from Nvidia. The company doesn't mention any plans to do that, only that it plans to support liquid cooling in its high- performance data center graphics cards.

It's not unusual for gaming cards to come straight from the factory with an all-in-one liquid cooler. I wouldn't be surprised if the next card in the RTX 5000-series was a liquid cooler.

Liquid-cooled cards will be incorporated into the server designs of companies like Supermicro, as well as the slot-in PCIe A. The next-gen version of the A 100 is due early in the future.