Microsoft has a tip for miners

Microsoft has just made some announcements concerning its work on the cooling of its datacenters. Given the evolution of the size and the multiplication of the latter, the cost of cooling has become a serious problem generating an increase in power consumption and therefore costs.

A liquid cooling system unlike any other at Microsoft

The software giant that deploys more and more server farms around the world has just demonstrated a cooling system that looks like a kind of big supermarket freezer in which the servers are immersed in a liquid developed by 3M . Obviously this liquid is totally harmless for the electronic components. When the temperature of the liquid reaches 50°C, it boils. The evacuation of the gas generated by the boiling is done by a kind of convector which allows to cool it. Thus the gas becomes liquid again and is reintroduced into the system.

Microsoft claims that this new cooling method will improve efficiency and sustainability by making better use of resources. It could thus allow a reduction in consumption of the order of 15%.

“Microsoft has studied liquid immersion as a cooling solution for high-performance computing applications such as AI. Among other things, the research found that two-phase immersion cooling reduced the power consumption of any server by 5% to 15%. “

However Microsoft acknowledges that it is not the first to use this system as crypto miners have already experimented with underwater systems to increase their mining power.

This system is also interesting because it does not consume (or pollute) water. It also avoids submerged datacenters, solutions on which both Microsoft and Google have worked but which raise serious questions about the impact on the environment.