In a fast-paced world, technological growth, especially in AI, machine learning and other data-intensive tasks will come at the expense of power consumption and environmental concerns. It seems like a foregone conclusion that the water, land or energy use needed for this growth is a necessary casualty to advance business.
Or is it?
Tech executives continually balance two separate but similar concerns: efficiency and sustainability. Efficiency is at the core of so much of today's pressure on tech execs. As companies strive to grow and innovate, reducing or maintaining costs becomes harder. Staying ahead in today’s business environment often calls for deploying massive computing power for cutting-edge AI without incurring substantial operating expenses. To address this, technological innovation has led to significant efficiency gains, forcing business leaders to rethink core assumptions about how to conduct typical operations.
One promising avenue for efficiency improvement is liquid-cooling. Despite its myriad benefits to the problem of too much heat from data-processing, liquid-cooling has not yet seen widespread adoption. Datacenter operators are, by nature risk-averse...and rightfully so. The worst-case scenario of downtime and costly equipment damage, which will cause significant harm to their business, makes them reluctant to experiment with unproven solutions. Additionally, the liquid-cooling solutions currently on the market have failed to meet their needs regarding reliability, support, raw performance and environmental impact.
This is where a new generation of forward-thinking tech comes into play. By addressing the concerns surrounding liquid-cooling, we can bridge the gap between efficiency and risk aversion, enabling companies to deploy powerful computing systems while minimizing their environmental strain.
On the sustainability front, tech executives must find a balance between resource-consumption and the innovation process. Consuming less power is a foolproof way to be more sustainable. By reducing the strain on a power grid and conserving resources, businesses can participate in the global movement toward preserving our planet. However, this reduction in power consumption should not mean that innovation and progress will go down as well.
To meet sustainability objectives while tackling the escalating power demands of datacenters, tech leaders must develop forward-thinking solutions. Air-cooling is a common but remarkably energy-inefficient solution, particularly in arid climates like Phoenix, Arizona (a datacenter hotspot). As chips become more powerful and compute demands grow, air-cooling becomes increasingly unsustainable.
Think about how high your home air-conditioning bill can get in the summer. Now think about a gigantic warehouse filled with thousands of high-powered computers that need to be kept at 45 degrees Fahrenheit around the clock. Power is finite, but fungible; the energy used to air-cool a datacenter could be allocated to more important tasks like actual computation power or powering houses and sustaining the life of the community around the datacenter.
