Happy Wednesday and welcome to Data Center Digest.
We’re looking at data centers and the people, technologies, and trends that make them run.

Here’s what we’re looking at today:

🖥 UK has plans for a new billion-dollar supercomputer and AI research center
🥕 Batteries, vegetables, and fuel cells: the future of backup power
Big Deals: A massive Mexican data center by CloudHQ, and Amazon planning two more in Louisa County, VA
Resources: The guy from storagereview.com is awesome

Est. read time: 4mins 57secs

- News -

UK announces new $1.1 billion supercomputer, AI facility

The development of the supercomputer and AI research facility are part of a UK initiative to drive the country’s research and innovation capabilities.

Isambard-3 (still confirming whose idea the name was)

Named after a 19^th- century British civil and mechanical engineer, the supercomputer is set to be installed at the National Composites Centre at the University of Bristol later this year.
Isambard-3 is part of a larger national facility to help support AI research and promote the safe use of technology.

According to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, the machine will be made up of thousands of state-of-the-art GPUs and will be “one of the most powerful (supercomputers) in Europe.”

Nvidia et al.

While the University won’t confirm many details about the supercomputer’s specs, we do know that Nvidia and Hewlett-Packard have been working alongside the team at Bristol in its development.

According to Techcircle, Isambard-3 will feature 384 Arm-based Nvidia Grace CPU superchips, which will make it six times better in performance and energy efficiency than its younger brother, Isambard-2.

“Isambard-3 will create several ‘world-firsts,’ and the new Arm-based NVIDIA Grace processors will enable new kinds of research and innovation in artificial intelligence and scientific simulations,” Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, Principal Investigator for the GW4 Isambard project said in a statement.

Mapping the future of data center backup power

Microsoft announced in July 2020 that it would eliminate its reliance on diesel fuel by 2030. In hindsight, this deadline may have been a key turning point in the industry’s approach to backup power.

Renewables like solar and wind don’t have the infrastructure to effectively replace existing power sources.
That means there’s an opportunity for clean, onsite fuel generation to fill in the gaps that traditional alternative energy sources cannot. 

Here’s a look at some of those options.

Batteries

Batteries are already a key component of powering the modern data center. Uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) use battery storage to ensure that servers and other hardware aren’t exposed to power line interruptions.

However, batteries are also implemented in grid-attached storage and are continuing to gain momentum as an instantaneous way to buttress capacity on grids or manage grid frequency.

In fact, Microsoft itself is using lithium-ion battery storage to both backup power and provide grid flexibility services in their Dublin data centers.

But the scalability of battery power isn’t there yet. The cost of batteries scales linearly, meaning that the initial investment is significantly higher than the cost of diesel generators, for a similar run time.
Plus, with current technology, even big batteries that address daily issues don’t have the capacity required to power a data center, much less a campus, as a primary source of power during a grid outage.

Biofuel

Any fuel derived from plant or algae material, or animal waste; biofuels burn much cleaner than fossil fuels.

What’s better is that biofuels require minimal retrofitting to existing diesel generators. This makes them an ideal bridge option for transferring away from traditional fuel sources without having to replace existing infrastructure.

Just this month Vantage announced its continued deployment of hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to replace conventional diesel fuel in its generators. The company said it will now roll out usage of renewable, diesel-like HVO in several of its largest markets in North America and EMEA.

The problem with biofuels like HVO is availability. Production of biodiesel is expected to grow minimally over the next five years, significantly impacting the fuel’s viability as a primary energy source.

Unless something drastic happens on the production side, biofuels will continue to be a niche solution to the power problem.

Hydrogen Fuel Cells

These innovative energy technologies use the chemical energy of hydrogen to cleanly and efficiently produce electricity.

Hydrogen fuel cells only emit water, making them among the greenest technologies that we have.
When combined with a hydrogen storage tank and an electrolyzer, they could be integrated into the power grid to provide load-balancing services.

While Microsoft has been testing this tech for backup storage and some of its data centers, the unit cost of the energy content of hydrogen can be higher than five times that of diesel.
Plus, transportation and storage present challenges, as they require temperatures as cold as -328 Fahrenheit.

In conclusion, none of these options are ideal right now, and it’s unclear what the breakthrough will be that emancipates our data centers from diesel backup. But the hyperscalers, along with many others, are working out a number of different options.

- Big Deals -

Huge Mexican hyperscale, coming soon

The central Mexican state of Queretaro has approved plans for a $4 billion CloudHQ data center.

As part of the agreement with Cloud HQ, the state will provide 5.6 million square feet of land (est. value of $17.7 million)
The hyperscale project is planned to consist of six buildings, each with up to 48MW of capacity, for a total of 288MW across the campus.

CloudHQ chose Queretaro for its new colossus for several reasons:

• Abundant power supply of the region

• Government commitment to economic development

• Proximity to major economic centers, i.e. Mexico City

• Fiber Optic connectivity

• Low probability of natural disasters like Earthquakes (frequent in Mexico)

CloudHQ has data centers all over the world and is currently building another 288MW in Rio de Janeiro which broke ground this spring.

- Big Deals -

Another one for Amazon: 1.7 million sqft in Louisa County, VA

Known as the Lake Anna Tech Campus AWS, the massive seven-building data center complex will cover over 1.7 million sq ft upon completion.

AWS intends to invest $11 billion by 2040 to establish two data center campuses in Louisa County's Technology Overlay District. The proposal is open for comments until October 26, 2023.

While Louisa County isn't renowned for data center development, neighboring Richmond hosts facilities from Meta, QTS, Flexential, EdgeConneX, and Lumen.

Resources

That’s it from us, thanks a lot for reading.

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- Taylor