Nvidia has announced its new plan to reduce power consumption from data centers that process huge amounts of data or train AI models: liquid-cooled graphics cards. The company told Computex that it is introducing a liquid-cooled version of its A100 computing card and says it consumes 30 percent less energy than the air-cooled version. Nvidia also promises that this is not just a one-off, it already has more liquid-cooled server cards in its roadmap and hints at introducing the technology to other applications such as in-car systems that need to keep cool indoors. Of course, the recent Tesla download for overheating chips shows how difficult this can be, even with liquid cooling.
According to Nvidia, reducing the energy required to perform complex calculations can have a big impact – the company says data centers use more than one percent of the world’s electricity, and 40 percent of that is due to cooling. Reducing this by almost a third would be a big deal, although it is worth noting that graphics cards are only part of the equation; Processors, storage, and networking equipment are also energy-intensive and need cooling. Nvidia claims that with liquid cooling, GPU-accelerated systems would be much more efficient than servers with only CPUs for AI and other high-performance tasks.
Nvidia roadmap for appliances and cards with liquid cooling. Image: Nvidia
This is why liquid cooling is popular in high-performance applications, from supercomputers to personalized gaming computers and even a few phones: liquids absorb heat better than air, according to Asetek, a major manufacturer of water cooling systems. And once you have a warm liquid, it’s relatively easy to transfer it elsewhere so it can cool down, compared to trying to cool the air throughout a building or increase the airflow to specific card components that dissipate all the heat.
In addition to energy efficiency, liquid-cooled cards have another bonus over their air-cooled counterparts – they take up significantly less space, which means you can put more of them in the same space.
Nvidia’s insistence on reducing energy consumption through liquid cooling comes at a time when many companies are considering the amount of energy their servers use. Although data centers are far from the only source of carbon emissions and pollution for large technologies, they are part of a puzzle that cannot be ignored, and critics point out that compensating for energy use through credit is not as impactful as reducing consumption in general. Companies like Microsoft have experimented with fully immersing servers in liquid and even deploying entire data centers in the ocean in an attempt to use less energy and water.
Of course, these solutions are quite exotic – while the type of liquid cooling offered by Nvidia is not necessarily the norm for data centers, it is not as much as placing your servers in the ocean (although so far Microsoft’s experiments with this have been shockingly successful). Nvidia explicitly advertises its liquid-cooled GPUs as “core” servers, not as a state-of-the-art solution.
But when can I get a liquid-cooled RTX card without modification?
This raises the question of whether we could see that Nvidia is trying to make liquid cooling even more widespread by incorporating liquid cooling into reference designs for its gaming-focused cards. The company does not mention any plans to do so, but says it plans to “maintain liquid cooling in our high-performance GPU data centers” in the “foreseeable future”.
However, server technology is converging on home computer technology all the time, and gaming cards coming straight from the factory with an all-in-one liquid cooler are not unheard of – AMD had several reference designs that include liquid-cooling circuit, and third parties have sold Nvidia liquid-cooled cards before. As Nvidia’s cards continue to draw more and more power (the stock 3090 Ti can draw up to 450 watts), I wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia announces an RTX 5000 series card that comes with a liquid cooler.
As for Nvida’s data center-focused cards, the company says companies like ASRock, Asus and Supermicro will include liquid-cooled cards on their servers “later this year” and that PCIe A100 card slots are coming through the third quarter of this year. A liquid-cooled PCIe version of the newly announced H100 card (which is the next-generation version of the A100) is expected in “early 2023”.
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