The race to keep data centres cool is heating up

A MICROWAVE oven typically puts out about 600 watts to 1,200 watts of heat to pop popcorn and reheat frozen pizzas. Now, imagine a similar amount of power condensed into an area less than the size of a postage stamp.

With 80 billion transistors packed into just 814 square millimetres, Nvidia’s latest H100 graphics processing unit (GPU) draws 700 watts of power running full-bore. Nearly all of that power is released as heat.

Rather than powering a gamer’s desktop, large pools of these GPUs are connected together to verify payments on blockchains, render animations and crunch data for machine learning, among other use cases.