NVIDIA has developed a new generation of AI servers dubbed Rubin that can be cooled by liquid at 45°C (113°F).
Rubin uses cold plates for cooling; they sit on top of the processor and extract heat via a fluid mixture that is 75% water and 25% propylene glycol. The fluid enters the cold plate at 45°C and exits at 55°C (131°F).
“With dry-cooler-based designs, it’s a closed-loop system with no evaporative water cooling – outside of maybe 1% of the year when we might need chillers in some climates,” said Ali Heydari, Director of Data Center Cooling and Infrastructure at NVIDIA.
In addition to operating at higher temperatures, NVIDIA’s new AI servers were designed to be 100% liquid cooled, with the company stating that previous liquid-cooled servers still required air cooling because their designs didn’t funnel heat created by the server’s other components fully to the cold plate. The Rubin design funnels all of the heat to a single inlet and outlet, which NVIDIA said enables a higher rack density by a third.
Scaling the market: Rubin has entered production and is already being used by a handful of tech companies, including CoreWeave, Google, Microsoft, Nebius and Oracle.
- In addition to being employed in private companies, the chips will also be used in national research labs, including Germany’s Leibniz Supercomputing Centre and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
- The Rubin servers can be used in existing data centers but require electrical upgrades that could run from $60,000 to $195,000 (€52,771 to €171,508) per rack.
Quenching AI’s thirst: NVIDIA estimates that data centers using cooling towers can cut their water consumption by 2.6 million gallons per megawatt per year to “near zero” by switching to a setup that pairs Rubin servers with dry coolers.
Quotable: “In the right geographic location, with the right system design, you don’t need any refrigeration equipment,” said Richard Whitmore, President and CEO of Schneider Electric. “You can just put big radiator coils outside and use the air temperature for all your cooling. It’s incredibly efficient.”
