The relentless rise of NVIDIA, the steadily increasing pledges of major private and public investments in national infrastructure projects around the world, and the general cultural obsession with AI have all made one thing clear: the data center boom has legs.It’s still far too early to determine exactly how big the growth trajectory will be.At the very least, though, it would seem reasonable to expect that new data center construction will continue to be a major feature of the global economy well into the next decade.
Just as much as it’s a boom in software development and deployment, the data center supercycle is/will be a manufacturing boom.When thinking about technologies that the vast majority of us experience exclusively on a virtual plane, it can be easy to lose sight of just how much physical hardware is required to facilitate those same technologies.To a greater extent than ever before, the data center industry will depend on innovation, production, and implementation of new equipment to sustain its current expansion.
For those primarily concerned with where the additive manufacturing (AM) industry’s best upcoming opportunities are, this setup suggests that AM may have quite the potential role to play in supporting new data center construction.I certainly believe that’s the case, which is why I wrote a report on the topic for AM Research, published in February.Someone who’s in an even better position than I am to know is 3D Systems’ Scott Green, who believes that, too.
What’s more, Green, the company’s Principal Solutions Leader for Industrial Solutions, has been here before, to some extent: Green says the current data center opportunity for the AM industry shares many parallels with the opportunity for AM in semiconductor capital (semicap) equipment, a market segment he has more than a decade of experience with.Two-fluid domain heat exchanger with cooling jacket.One semicap equipment manufacturer with whom 3D Systems has worked for well over a decade leverages the unique geometries only achievable with AM to optimize the thermal management performance of high-value parts, such as wafer tables.
The role that AM is best-suited to play in the data center infrastructure market also revolves around temperature control.The need to cool server accounts for up to 40 percent of the cost of data center power generation, and that number may only continue to rise with the insatiable power requirements of AI chips: “When I was in college, I had a Pentium II processor, 200 megahertz computer in my dorm.It wasn’t guaranteed that everybody on the floor would even have a computer in their room — it was still pretty common for people to just go down to the computer lab when they needed to do research or type up a paper,” Green recalled.
“Then, CPU capability exploded, but the PC industry still wasn’t really concerned with thermal management.“The renewed importance of TDP [Thermal Design Power] only truly started to accelerate when smartphones came around — and tablets, etc.— and now engineers had to think about how to cool down these devices people are holding in their hands.
In that case, the need to keep portable devices light weight meant that, pretty quickly, tech companies had to figure out how to optimize chips so that they operated cooler, as opposed to running hot and then being cooled down with an additional piece of hardware.“That will eventually happen in the AI chip space, as well, but we’re not there yet.For the next decade at least, data centers will continue to have heat management problems that they need to solve with new cooling hardware, and continuous attention to and optimization of thermal management systems.” Specifically, AI data centers will need solutions like direct-to-chip (DTC) liquid cooling, as opposed to relying exclusively on traditional HVAC systems, which have been the historical norm.
Increasingly, data center industry stakeholders are recognizing that DTC becomes more or less a requirement once their power loads reach 30kw per rack.NVIDIA’s latest AI architecture is expected to reach 140kw per rack: ”When you’re spending $300-400 thousand per rack unit, times eight in each rack, now that’s upwards of two million dollars in capital compute equipment that you need in order to run your business,” explained Green.“So you’re willing to spend more for a more efficient cooling system.
And that’s where AM is ready to swoop in and provide that.This is a high-value technology that warrants a specialized infrastructure.“Here, the comparison I’d make between the semicap equipment market and the market for data center infrastructure is that it’s like the relationship between F1, and aerospace and automotive.
F1 will originate the best practices in terms of aerodynamics, mechanical design, light-weighting, and AM design optimization, and then all those concepts get spun-off to the aerospace sector and the commercial auto market.“The semicap equipment market has been solving major heating and cooling problem for forever — fluid conveyance, chillers, all sorts of different applications.Now, there’s a crossover opportunity emerging where these harder problems that have already been solved further upstream can be implemented all the way down the value chain.” Leak-free Copper Liquid Cooler for NVIDIA A4000 GPU.
Image courtesy of 3D Systems.This is why 3D Systems is precisely the company that’s ready to hit the ground running in the emerging market for AM in the data center space.According to Green, the company has been working directly with the data center industry for about three years, “with a small number of very unique AI HPC customers that are non-GPU based.” Again, just as with semicap equipment, the key to successful market penetration in the data center industry seems to be to establish the right partnerships with the right customers, before the product development phase even begins: “Making a product and hoping that it’s going to get bought has, historically, been the typical way of doing things for most AM companies,” said Green.
“But I think the companies that have the most breadth and understanding in the industry, who have already been there and solved those problems will have the easiest time solving the same set of problems in a new context.3D Systems, for instance, can significantly shorten the cycle time for developing new cooling solutions, because we’ve already been solving difficult thermal management problems in the semiconductor equipment space for almost fifteen years at this point.” Green lifted up his hand to show me a cooler that the company has produced: “We designed this cooler for an [NVIDIA RTX] A4000 in less than an hour, and it works phenomenally.You see a lot of people in the market who know that there’s an opportunity here, so it’s important for the potential customer to have a good filter when exploring additive solutions.
There are definitely a lot of prospective demo parts and pretty pictures floating around right now.“But customers should be able to identify the potential partners who know how to solve the real cooling problems, at a rapid pace, because they have already implemented a certain design architecture elsewhere.In those cases, solving the problem correctly more or less involves configurations of existing AM design strategies to fit new requirements.
“There’s four or five different design concepts we put on absolutely everything where thermal management is the objective, because we know those concepts work.We use shower heads and reservoirs, buffer reservoirs to evenly blast fluid into an area, so you get even fluid distribution as opposed to just left-to-right, linear distribution.That’s something we learned from doing semicap equipment.
If you’ve got the experience that lets you know a handful of design methodologies and architectures can be applied, you can be very successful in a very efficient manner as the need to run multiple simulations is eliminated.” Cross-section of a liquid nitrogen (LN2) heatsink for extreme CPU cooling.With all that said, how does the market opportunity for AM in data center infrastructure stack up against the opportunity for AM in the semicap equipment? According to Green, “higher risk, higher reward” for the data center industry may be a good way to juxtapose the two different markets: “I think the data center additive opportunity is much bigger, although it’s probably significantly more volatile, too,” Green concluded.“You can see significant spikes in revenue and opportunity, but then everything can shift quite suddenly if the chip architecture changes.
On the other hand, AM could be ideal in that sense, as well, because you can make parts without tooling, or extensive planning and supply chain orchestration.And in the semicap equipment space, it takes two years for a new project to come to fruition.Here, the mentality is very much, let’s move as fast as humanly possible.” Images courtesy of 3D Systems.
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