U.S. Department of Energy funds 15 projects for more efficient cooling of data centres

According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), data centres account for approximately 2% of total U.S. electricity consumption while cooling can account for up to 40% of data centre energy usage overall. On 9 May 2023, the DOE announced that 15 projects have been selected as part of the COOLERCHIPS programme (Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability, and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems). The selected projects—located at national labs, universities, and businesses—seek to reduce the energy necessary to cool data centres. 

 

The proposals include technologies such as liquid cooling, chip-level direct two-phase impingement jet cooling, immersion cooling, additively manufactured flow manifolds, heat pipes, etc. Cooling technologies funded under the COOLERCHIPS program also aim for higher heat rejection temperatures, to enable high quality waste heat recovery for other applications. Furthermore, use of more reduced sized coolers would also make modular data centres more feasible, allowing the cooling system to scale with the size of the module, improving maintainability and reducing cost. 

 

Learn more about the projects selected on the website for the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.