Whether you like it or not artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay and is only going to get smarter. AI is quickly becoming a part of our everyday lives with it solving problems, answering questions and increasing efficiency and productivity for both consumers and businesses. There are clearly plenty of bonuses of artificial intelligence but there is also one massive downside as it uses vast amounts of power.
Even a quick query via ChatGPT is thought to use enough energy to power a lightbulb for 20 minutes and Google confirmed earlier this year that its total greenhouse gas emissions have risen by nearly 50 percent over the past five years with that increase mainly driven by the electricity that it needs to powers AI data centres.
It’s a worrying stat but Chinese giant Lenovo thinks it may have one answer to help crunch the numbers.
During the firm’s yearly Tech World conference – which has taken place this week in Seattle – the company revealed its new ThinkSystem Neptune technology which could reduce AI data centre power consumption by up to 40 percent.
In fact, on stage at the showcase, the firm said its update offers “the world’s coolest accelerated computing.”
The new system works via clever water cooling which provides 100 percent heat removal. This enables customers to run powerful server racks without specialised and power-hungry air conditioning.
“As AI adoption increases, data centres need to be re-engineered for higher thermal densities,” Lenovo explained.
“With the advanced water cooling, the new ThinkSystem server allows critical components to operate at lower temperatures and effectively removes all heat from all components.”
What makes this technology more impressive is that the water pumped around the servers doesn’t need to be cold which helps reduce power consumption even further. It actually uses warm water which can even be repurposed after use to provide heating, for example.
Lenovo is also working with NVIDIA to improve AI technology further with the partnership boasting that it can run “trillion-parameter AI models that bring products to market faster, at lower cost and with higher energy efficiency.”
Of course, these massive data centres aren’t something most consumers will ever get near or be that interested in knowing about.
But with more of us relying on AI, the tech industry clearly needs to work out ways to cut down on the vast amount of power this smart service is munching through.
“For more than a decade, Lenovo has pioneered liquid cooling innovations, with the goal of bringing the power of high-performance computing to every organization,” said Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang.
“Through groundbreaking liquid-cooling engineering and technology integration, ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune is unlocking a new era of data center efficiency and design that will help bring NVIDIA Blackwell and trillion-parameter AI to all, while fundamentally changing how power is used in the data center.”
