Electricity and Control January-February 2025

Energy management + energy e iciency

Prioritising energy efficiency in data centres 2025

Giordano Albertazzi, CEO, Vertiv.

AI continues to reshape the data centre industry. This reality is reflected in the projected 2025 data centre trends issued by Vertiv, where experts anticipate increased industry innovation and integration to support high-density computing, regulatory scrutiny around AI, as well as increasing focus on sustainability and cybersecurity.

“E xperts at Vertiv correctly identified the proliferation of AI and the need to transition to more complex liquid- and air-cooling strategies as a trend for 2024, and activity on that front is expected to further accelerate and evolve in 2025,” said Vertiv CEO Giordano Albertazzi. “With AI driving rack densities into three- and four-digit kilowatts, the need for advanced and scalable solutions to power and cool those racks, minimise their environmental footprint, and empower these emerging ‘AI factories’ has never been higher. We anticipate significant progress on that front in 2025, and our customers demand it.” Outlined below are the trends Vertiv sees as most likely to emerge across the data centre industry through 2025. Innovations in power and cooling In 2025, the impact of compute-intense workloads will increase, with the industry managing the sudden change in various ways. Advanced computing will continue to shi‘ from CPUs (central processing units) to GPUs (graphics processing units) to leverage the latter’s parallel computing power and the higher thermal design point of modern chips. This will further stress existing power and cooling systems and push data centre operators towards cold-plate and immersion cooling solutions that remove heat at the rack level. Enterprise data centres will be impacted by this trend, as AI use expands beyond early cloud and colocation providers. ƒ AI racks will require UPS systems, batteries, power dis tribution equipment and switchgear with higher power densities to handle AI loads that can fluctuate from a 10% idle to a 150% overload in a flash. ƒ Hybrid cooling systems, with liquid-to-liquid, liquid-to air and liquid-to-refrigerant configurations, will evolve in rackmount, perimeter and row-based cabinet models that can be deployed in brown/greenfield applications.

ƒ Liquid cooling systems will increasingly be paired with their own dedicated, high-density UPS systems to provide continuous op eration. ƒ Servers will increasingly be integrated with the infrastructure needed to support them, including factory-integrated liquid cooling, to make manufacturing and assembly more e€icient, deployment faster, equipment footprint smaller, and to increase system energy e€iciency. Energy availability Overextended grids and soaring power demands are changing how data centres consume power. Globally, data centres use an average of 1 to 2% of the world’s power, but AI is driving increases in consumption that are likely to push that to 3 to 4% by 2030 [1] . Expected increases may place demands on the grid that many utilities cannot handle, attracting regulatory attention from governments around the globe – including potential restrictions on data centre builds and energy use – and spiking costs and carbon emissions that data centre organisations are racing to control. These pressures are forcing organisations to prioritise energy e€iciency and sustainability more than they have until now. In 2024, Vertiv predicted a trend towards energy alternatives and microgrid deployments, and in 2025 it anticipates an acceleration of this trend, with real movement towards prioritising and seeking out energy-e€icient solutions and energy alternatives that are new to this arena. Fuel cells and alternative battery chemistries are increasingly available for microgrid energy options. Over the longer term, many companies [2] are developing small modular reactors [3] for data centres and other large power consumers, with availability expected around the end of the decade. Progress on this front warrants watching in 2025. Collaboration on AI factory development Average rack densities have been increasing steadily over the past few

It is expected that AI could drive increases in data centres’ power consumption globally, to 3 to 4% of the world’s power by 2030.

JAN-FEB 2025 Electricity + Control

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