Schneider Electric working with Nvidia to design data center cooling systems

By Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) – French electrical equipment maker Schneider Electric is working with Nvidia to develop designs for data center cooling systems for use in new artificial intelligence data centers, it said on Wednesday.

Schneider’s designs will be used in data centres that use Nvidia’s flagship server containing 72 of its most powerful AI chips, which is rolling out early next year. No financial details of the agreement were disclosed.

Those servers will consume up to 132 kilowatts of power per server rack, and the most powerful versions will require liquid cooling to operate.

Nvidia’s decision to switch most of its chip lineup to liquid cooling has spurred a flurry of data center construction and reconfiguration to accommodate the new chips.

Aparna Prabhakar, senior vice president of the secure power division at Schneider, said the company worked with Nvidia to design a range of cooling system options that can be scaled up or down, depending on how many Nvidia servers are being installed and how much power they consume.

The plans will be sold to cloud computing firms or data center customers.

“It is heavy lifting on both sides,” Prabhakar said of the engineering effort. “We take care of everything which is outside of the servers, and Nvidia is working on what’s inside the server.”

Schneider, which last month replaced its CEO, has been working to expand its AI data center business and in 2023 signed a deal with Compass Datacenters to supply $3 billion of electrical equipment over five years.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jan Harvey)