Intel is set to pump $700 million into a new “mega-lab” focused on building next-generation liquid immersion cooling technology.
The 200,000 square foot building will begin construction later this year at the company’s Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro, Oregon, and is scheduled to open in late 2023.
Immersion cooling allows servers and other IT components to be submerged in dielectric liquid, eliminating the need for expensive data center air conditioning.
What will the lab do?
In addition to immersion cooling, the lab will also conduct research on water use efficiency and heat recovery and reuse.
Additionally, Intel said the lab will work on qualifying, testing, and enabling Intel’s data center and dedicated hosting portfolio, including Intel Xeon, Intel Optane, network interfaces and switches, Intel Agilex FPGAs, Xe architecture, Habana accelerators and other future products. in development.
The new lab will also house an “Advanced Technology Showcase” allowing customers and partners to observe and test Intel products in a variety of data center environments in the lab.
In addition, Intel also released an Open Intellectual Property (Open IP) liquid immersion cooling solution and reference design
Intel said the design will allow partners to accelerate the introduction of Intel solutions in response to the trend of increasing data center power density.
The initial solution and proof-of-concept design will be done in partnership with Intel Taiwan and implemented across the Taiwanese ecosystem in a phased approach, with plans to roll out globally.
Data center sustainability continues to be a relevant issue.
Data centers account for about 1% of global electricity demand and account for about 0.3% of global carbon emissions according to Intel’s own statistics.
Fueled by growth during the Covid-19 pandemic, data center revenues would hit $948 billion by the end of the decade, according to forecasts from data and analytics firm GlobalData.