Nvidia's Huang champions Supermicro's direct liquid cooling tech

Taipei, June 5 (CNA) Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) made an appearance during a speech by Supermicro counterpart Charles Liang (梁見後) at Computex in Taipei Wednesday to champion the benefits of direct liquid cooling for artificial intelligence (AI) data centers.

Describing himself as Liang's long-time partner and Supermicro's "best sales guy," Huang said that with the widespread transition to generative AI capable of generating text, images and video, data centers would need to upgrade to greener, more efficient systems.

Huang added that the estimated US$3 trillion poured into new data centers by 2030 would see demand for Supermicro's solutions soar, "and Charles and the Supermicro team are ready to take your order."

Data processing has been increasing exponentially in the AI era and with GPU (graphic processing unit) servers will now need to be assisted by solutions such as Supermicro's Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC) system, introduced by Liang Wednesday, to accelerate computing.

During Wednesday's keynote, Taiwan-born and raised Liang stressed that Supermicro's liquid cooling solutions helped AI data centers save energy and money better than traditional air conditioning.

As a server manufacturer and IT infrastructure provider, U.S.-based Supermicro has experienced unprecedented business growth with AI in recent years.

"We were the first company to bring optimized GPU (graphic processing unit) servers to the market with Nvidia back in 2014, and since then we have been one of the main providers of AI assistance of optimized solutions to many leading AI factories in the world," Liang said.

Counting Intel, AMD, and also Nvidia as its partners, Liang said Supermicro along with these partners is "on a mission to build more sustainable data center infrastructures that address the rising need for more computing and storage in today's world, especially when it comes to generative AI training and inferencing."

Supporting the latest AI development can be challenging through the traditional air cooling method, as it is more expensive and environmentally taxing than DLC, which Liang said had been around for more than 30 years.

"Unlike air cooling through air conditioning requiring a substantial amount of electricity to operate, DLC can use room temperature water to provide optimal cooling for servers at much lower cost and with smaller environmental impact," the Supermicro CEO said.

Liang added that the company's goal is to make DLC quickly become a mainstream solution for any AI data center and factory that aims to improve efficiency and at the same time reduce operating expenses.

The company's DLC solutions grew from zero percent to about less than 1 percent in market share in the last 30 years, but is already expecting 15 to 30 percent of market share in the next one to two years, the Supermicro CEO said.

(By Alison Hsiao)

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