Asperitas launches line of modular Direct Forced Convection immersion cooling tanks

• Cooling firm Asperitas has launched a new line of modular Direct Forced Convection products for immersion cooling.

• The Dutch company this month launched its DFCX series, a product line designed for standalone Edge facilities through to and including hyperscale data centers.

• Asperitas announced plans to launch a Direct Forced Convection immersion tank in June 2024. Previously, Asperitas offered a perpetual natural convection immersion tank.

• The modular cluster architecture can range from 12U upwards in each tank, and supports ‘supercluster’ configurations with multiple tanks and CDUs.

• The 12U tank supports cooling up to 5kW/U and more than 1kW per chip. A single DFCX1 solution supports compute clusters of 3x4U system nodes, with a total of 24 GPUs with targeted flow and up to 60kW of cooling capacity.

• According to the company’s specs page, the unit measures 600mm x 1,215mm x 1,990 mm. It will weigh around 1,120kg with IT and offer an electrical capacity of 44kW. The tank requires a minimum of 352 liters of dielectric fluid – Asperitas has partnered with Shell for its fluid.

Euro cloud Exoscale trials Diggers direct liquid cooling system

• A1 Digital's cloud provider Exoscale is trialing a direct liquid cooling system in its Vienna, Austria, data center. The direct liquid cooling system, developed by Austrian company Diggers, sees server blades sealed in a cold box.

• As reported by The Register, the cold box prevents air from getting in or out, while cold plates with microchannels bring the cooling liquid to the GPUs and CPUs. Diggers claims that the system removes the need for a cold aisle, reducing energy consumption by 50 percent and achieving a PUE of 1.05.

• The cold plates are made from aluminum, to prevent rusting, and one plate can cool two GPUs - one on either side of the plate. Each cold box can contain four server blades mounted vertically.

• Exoscale's deployment at its Vienna data center is currently made up of eight cold boxes, with a total of 80kW of compute capacity. Exoscale's COO Antoine Coestsier said that while currently a proof of concept, the company plans to "ramp it up" as the solution can handle the most powerful GPUs available.

• The water coming out of the cold box is around 50°C (122°F) and can be used either on-premise for heat reuse, or sent to a local heating network.

• Exoscale is A1 Digital's European cloud and hosting platform. The company has data centers in Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, Geneva, Zurich, and Sofia. The company has two data centers in Vienna - one located in the Arsenal, a former military complex, and the other in the A1 Next Generation Data Center, which Exoscale describes as one of its most modern data center facilities.

Colovore breaks ground on Reno data center

• Liquid-cooled data center provider Colovore has begun work on its first facility outside California. The company this week announced it has broken ground on its RN01 facility in Reno, Nevada.

• The 20MW site is set to launch in late 2025/early 2026. The site will offer densities of up to 250kW per rack through direct-to-chip and rear-door cooling.

• Launched in 2013, Colovore carved out an early niche for liquid-cooled racks capable of up to 35kW. The company launched its original single-story, 24,000 sq ft (2,230 sqm) facility at 1101 Space Park Drive in Santa Clara, California in 2014, with the last 2MW expansion announced in February 2022.

• The company announced plans to build a second 9MW facility, known as SJC02, on a neighboring plot in November 2022. The facility, located at 3060 Raymond Street, is due to launch soon. SJC02 will support densities up to 250kW per cabinet through a combination of rear door and direct-to-chip liquid cooling.

• At the time of the acquisition, the company noted plans to expand and has since detailed plans for facilities in Reno, Nevada, and Chicago, Illinois.

Immersion cooling firm Submer to release autonomous robot

• Immersion cooling firm Submer is developing a robot to automate the installation and removal of servers from immersion tanks.Immersion tanks in data halls pose a different operational challenge to traditional racks. Servers and equipment must be lifted in and out of tanks vertically, rather than slid in and out horizontally.

• In many deployments, it is common to have a portable crane – akin to the kind used to remove car engines – or a fixed overhead system if the room allows for it. Once servers are removed, the dielectric fluid must be collected and cleaned off the removed servers – often requiring a drip tray and a cleaning solution.

• While Submer can currently provide a crane, the company’s robot aims to speed up and simplify this process, removing the need for any type of lifting systems and simplifying the fluid clean-up process.

• The robotic crash cart will reportedly be coming out later this year – possibly around Q3.

• Submer isn’t the first to try and automate server deployments into immersion tanks. TMGcore launched Otto, a two-phase immersion cooling system that used robotic arms to handle maintenance tasks, around 2020.

• TMGcore did announce a moving version of Otto in 2021 – called Ottomobile – that was attached to the back of a Ford Truck and designed as a mobile Edge data center rather than a data hall robot. The company has since been bought by Modine and been rolled into its Airedale unit.

Nordik DC partners with Accelsius for data center in Montreal, Canada

• Direct-to-chip cooling specialist Accelsius has partnered with Nordik Data Centers to build an AI data center in Montreal, Canada.

• The project will also feature a “co-innovation lab” where customers can validate performance metrics and efficiency gains of Accelsius’ cooling technology. The lab is expected to be operational in Q2 2025.

• Canada-based Nordik Data Centers operates one facility, NDC1, in the Shawinigan region of Quebec, Canada. It offers 5MW of IT capacity across 46,000 sq ft (4,274 sqm).

• The company also said it has more than two million sq ft (185,800 sqm) of “ready to develop land," fully equipped with infrastructure and redundant fiber connectivity. According to the company’s website, Nordik has space for a total of six data center facilities across the same parcel of land.

• Founded by NASDAQ-listed Ivventure Inc., Accelsius’ offerings include cooling solutions for data center and Edge operators. The company’s NeuCool platform provides a two-phase quid cooling system, capable of scaling from single racks to entire facilities.

Carrier Global invests in liquid cooling firm ZutaCore

• Carrier this week announced that its venture group, Carrier Ventures, is leading an investment and technology partnership with ZutaCore, a provider of two-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling for data centers.

• Carrier said the investment aligns with its strategy of “providing high-tech, integrated cooling solutions to meet the critical cooling needs of data center customers.”

• ZutaCore uses closed-loop two-phase cooling; a version of liquid cooling in which the coolant is allowed to boil and condense (changing its phase), removing heat more effectively than simply using heat conduction. Taiwanese IT infrastructure provider Wiwynn is an investor in the company.

• Founded in 1915 as a HVAC firm, Carrier was acquired by United Technologies in 1979 and spun off as an independent company again in 2020.

• This month also saw Carrier launch QuantumLeap, a new suite of solutions for data center thermal management. The suite includes chillers and air handlers, a liquid cooling CDU, building management systems, and maintenance services.

Sesterce invests €450m in AI data center in Valence, France

• French cloud computing provider Sesterce is investing €450 million ($471.85m) into developing an AI data center in Valence, France.

• The data center is set to be located in the Rovaltain business park in Valence Romans Agglo, and will house 40,000 GPUs for the training and deployment of AI.

• The data center will use a closed-loop water cooling system which will enable the waste heat to be reused. Works will commence in September 2025 with the data center expected to be launched before the end of 2026.

• The €450m is the first tranche of investment, eventually expected to reach €1.8bn ($1.89bn) including hardware costs. The data center is part of a wider national plan to develop AI infrastructure in France.

• Sesterce has committed to developing 1.5GW of compute power in France, including the deployment of 1.2 million GPUs by 2030.

• Sesterce established its first data center presence in 2018. In October 2024, the company launched an HPC cluster in Paris featuring Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers equipped with Nvidia H200 Tensor Core GPUs, and in December announced a cluster of H100 GPUs housed at a Digital Realty data center in Marseille.

Core Scientific leases AUBix data center in Auburn, Alabama

• Data center firm Core Scientific is expanding its footprint into Alabama. The company, which develops cryptomine and HPC data centers, this week announced plans for a facility in Auburn, Lee County.

• Core Scientific said its Auburn data center will housed within the existing AUBix facility at 1571 W Samford Avenue. It will launch with a capacity of 16MW, with potential for further expansion.

• AUBix announced plans for a new data center in Auburn in August 2021. Construction on the 40,000 sq ft (3,700 sqm) single-story facility finished in March 2022. At the time it was set to offer up to 4MW across two data halls. The company was founded by Andrew Albrecht, who previously held roles at Cyxtera, A2 Advisors, Allegiance Telecom, and a number of software firms.

• In September 2024, Core Scientific posted an SEC filing noting a lease agreement by and between the company and AUBix. The 10-year deal was for 5.7 acres of land, including a 40,000-square-foot building that Core intended to use for its HPC hosting operations.

• Core Scientific currently operates nine cryptomine and HPC data centers across six states—Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Texas— with an additional facility under development in Oklahoma.

AI cloud Lambda raises $480m, including from Nvidia, In-Q-Tel, and Andrej Karpathy

• AI cloud company Lambda has raised $480 million in a Series D round.Andra Capital and SGW led the investment, alongside new investors Andrej Karpathy (of OpenAI and Tesla fame), ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (the CIA's investment arm), KHK & Partners, Nvidia, and others.

• Server makers Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron and Wiwynn also made a 'strategic investment,' while additional participation came from existing investors including 1517, Crescent Cove, and USIT.

• The Silicon Valley-based business pitches itself as the cloud service for AI developers, with Lambda GPU Cloud operating out of colocation data centers in San Francisco, California, and Allen, Texas.

• Alongside its cloud service, it helps enterprises deploy Nvidia servers at their own data centers. Earlier this year, the company installed a GB200 NVL72 rack at ECL's hydrogen-powered data center in Mountain View, California.

Aramco's Wa'ed Ventures invests in AI cloud provider Ori

• Aramco's venture capital arm Wa'ed Ventures has invested in UK AI cloud provider Ori.The investment follows Ori's recent £140 million ($176.23m) raise, and the AI cloud provider has another larger raise underway that will be completed in 2025.

• Ori was founded in 2019, and now operates in more than 20 locations worldwide. The company recently added Nvidia's H200 chips to its GPU offering in the UK and is preparing for the Nvidia GB200 systems. In October 2024, Ori launched a private cloud cluster comprised of 1,024 Nvidia H100s, and based on the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD reference architecture.

• The company does not own its data centers, but leases space in colocation facilities. It is a known customer of EdgeConneX in Europe and Centersquare in the US.

• Wa'ed Ventures is a $500 million fund that invests in tech startups across various verticals and began looking at international companies in 2022, specifically those that can bring technology platforms and services into Saudi Arabia. The company has also backed AI chipmaker Rebellions.

EnCharge AI closes oversubscribed $100m Series B funding round for development of analog in-memory chips

• The oversubscribed round was led by Tiger Global and saw participation from Samsung Ventures and HH-CTBC. It brings the total amount raised by EnCharge AI to more than $144m.

• Founded in 2022 after it spun out of Princeton University, EnCharge AI has been developing analog in-memory chip technology which it claims is able to achieve orders-of-magnitude higher compute efficiency and density compared to today's best-in-class solutions.

• The startup says it is the only company to have developed a “robust and scalable analog in-memory AI inference chip” and accompanying software, adding that its chip architecture uses existing semiconductor manufacturing processes, allowing it to rapidly scale production.

GPU cloud provider Fluidstack signs MoU for 1GW AI supercomputer in France

• GPU cloud provider Fluidstack has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the French government to build an AI supercomputer in the country.

• The system was announced at the recent AI Action Summit in Paris and, according to Fluidstack, will be one of the world’s largest low-carbon AI supercomputers.

• Founded in 2017 at Oxford University, Fluidstack currently has more than 100,000 GPUs under management on its platform, with customers including Mistral AI, Character.AI, Poolside, and Black Forest Labs.

• The facility set to house the system will offer 1GW of dedicated AI compute and will be powered by “France’s abundant, carbon-free, and predominantly nuclear energy,” the company said, adding the site has been designed to scale beyond 1GW by 2028.

• The supercomputer is currently set to go live in 2026, with phase one of the project funded by a €10 billion ($10.4bn) investment. Fluidstack said that its financial partners had expressed "strong interest" in funding the project.

  
  

Musk’s xAI releases artificial intelligence model Grok 3, claims better performance than rivals in early testing

• Elon Musk’s AI startup unveiled it’s latest AI model, Grok 3, which it says outperforms cutting-edge models from competitors.

• Grok 3 features will be rolled out for premium users of social media platform X, starting Tuesday stateside, while the model will also be accessible through a separate subscription for the Grok web and app version.

• Grok 3 will be rolled out for premium X subscribers, starting Tuesday stateside, and will also be accessible through a separate subscription for the model’s web and app versions, the xAI team said.

• The xAI team claimed that an early iteration of Grok 3 had been given better ratings than existing competitors on Chatbot Arena, a crowdsourced website that pits different AI models against each other in blind tests.