DOE Funds 15 Data Center Cooling Projects Under COOLERCHIPS Program

The Department of Energy has allocated around $40 million to 15 projects designed to develop high-performance cooling solutions for data centers located at national laboratories, universities and businesses.

Seven companies, seven universities and one national laboratory secured millions in funding to pursue their projects. The largest slice of funding was awarded to computer hardware company Nvidia, which secured $5 million to develop a data center with a two-phase cooling system that can achieve a thermal resistance as low as below 1 degree Celsius.

The 15 projects are supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which supports initiatives that explore new ways of generating, storing and using energy. Specifically, the projects were selected as part of the Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems program, the DOE said Wednesday.

The COOLERCHIPS program is designed to reduce the amount of energy needed to cool data centers to less than 5 percent of the typical IT load. According to ARPA-E, a more efficient data center cooling system will reduce the facility’s operational carbon dioxide footprint and could make overall operations more efficient.