Nvidia Announces New Liquid-Cooled GPUs: How It Will Double Data Center Computing Power

Nvidia Corporation NVDA made a splash with its announcements at "Computex 2022," that is currently underway in Taiwan. Keynote speakers from the company touched upon several focus areas, including data center and AI.

What Happened: Among the notable announcements was one concerning a new graphics processing unit that adds momentum to its sustainability initiatives.

Nvidia announced its first data center PCle GPU with direct chip liquid cooling. This provides enterprises the option to deploy green data centers, it added.

The first liquid-cooled A100 PCle GPUs will begin to ship in the third quarter.

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Why It's Important: Data center operators currently use chillers that require millions of gallons of water a year to cool the air inside data centers. Liquid cooling, the company said, provides systems that recycle small amounts of fluids in closed systems focused on key hot spots.

A data center using liquid cooling could run the same workloads as an air-cooled facility while using about 30 percent less energy, Nvidia said, citing results of a test. NVIDIA estimates the liquid-cooled data center could hit 1.15 power usage effectiveness, far below 1.6 for its air-cooled counterpart.

Additionally, liquid-cooled data centers can pack twice as much computing into the same space, as the A100 GPUs use just one PCIe slot as opposed to two by air-cooled A100 GPUs.

Nvidia noted that several system manufacturers, including ASUS and Hon Hai Precision Manufacturing Company Limited HNHPF plan to incorporate these GPUs into their offerings later this year.

Nvidia said it plans to follow up the A100 PCle card with a version using H100 Tensor Core GPU based on the Hopper architecture next year. The company also plans to support liquid cooling in its HPC data center GPUs and HGX platforms.

In premarket trading Tuesday, Nvidia stock was seen moving down 1.47% to $166.50, according to data from Benzinga Pro.