tag: data centers

What Is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) In Data Centers?
By Paul Wiener - 07 May, 2026 - Comments: 0

In 2024, data centers consumed around 415 terawatt hours (TWh), or about 1.5% of global electricity, says the International Energy Agency. As the backbone of the digital economy, data centers are estimated to consume 2-3% of the world’s electricity by 2030. To manage this consumption, industry leaders have relied on a single metric: Power usage effectiveness (PUE). What is power usage ... » read more

Research Bits: May 5
By Jesse Allen - 05 May, 2026 - Comments: 0

AI power prediction Researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab developed a prediction tool that can quickly tell data center operators how much power will be consumed by running a particular AI workload on a certain processor or AI accelerator chip. It can be applied to a wide range of hardware configurations. The lightweight estimation model captures the power usage pattern of a GP... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review
By The SE Staff - 24 Apr, 2026 - Comments: 0

Deals Marvell acquired Polariton Technologies, a Swiss developer of plasmonics-based silicon photonics devices. Onto Innovation is partnering with Rigaku, combining Onto’s analysis software with Rigaku’s CD-SAXS platform for advanced semiconductor process control. Onto also agreed to acquire a 27% stake in Rigaku for about $710M. Tesla plans to use Intel’s 14A process for its T... » read more

Silicon Photonics Lights The Way To More Efficient Data Centers
By Katherine Derbyshire - 16 Apr, 2026 - Comments: 0

Key Takeaways Photonic interconnects potentially increase bandwidth density while significantly reducing power consumption. AI workloads are driving their adoption in data centers. On the other hand, photonic interconnects require a variety of different materials, introducing process compatibility and thermal and mechanical stress issues. Integrated electro-optical I/O modules are th... » read more

The Thermal And Power Realities Of The AI Era
By Rafael Tudela - 16 Apr, 2026 - Comments: 0

The rapid growth of AI has created a surge in the global energy consumption at a rate never seen before. Today, data centers account for approximately 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity globally. To put this into perspective, the annual energy consumption of the United Kingdom in 2023 measured at 309 TWh. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects data centers’ energy consumption wil... » read more

AI Growing Impact On Chip Design And EDA Tools
By Ed Sperling - 15 Apr, 2026 - Comments: 0

Key Takeaways Many workflows in the data center are customer-specific, which is part of the reason there is so much interest in agentic AI-enabled tools. Large systems companies are pressing EDA vendors for performance improvements to keep pace with their AI workflows. The makeup of design teams is changing as AI infiltrates more of the chip design process. Experts at the Ta... » read more

AI Workloads Are Turning The Data Center Network Into A Combined Memory And Storage Fabric
By Saurabh Gayen - 26 Mar, 2026 - Comments: 0

Recent industry trends, including the release of NVIDIA’s Rubin platform (developer.nvidia.com), point to a growing consensus that AI inference is reshaping data center architecture in a fundamental way. As inference workloads become dominant, the data center network is no longer just a communication layer between servers. It is increasingly part of a distributed memory and storage hierarchy,... » read more

Scaling AI Infrastructure: Overcoming Interconnect Bottlenecks Via CPO And Heterogeneous Integration
By Vincent Lin - 19 Mar, 2026 - Comments: 0

The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surpassed the capabilities of traditional monolithic compute architectures. The industry is shifting toward a systemic approach, where large-scale distributed clusters of GPUs/AI accelerators function as a single, unified computational engine to support the next generation of trillion-parameter models. Co-packaged optics (CPO) offers s... » read more

Scale Up, Scale Out Get a New Partner
By Bryon Moyer - 12 Mar, 2026 - Comments: 0

Key Takeaways: Three AI data center scaling strategies are scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across. Scale-up is within a rack; scale-out is between racks; scale-across is between data centers. Each of the three uses a different interconnect strategy to optimize either latency or jitter. As today’s data center workloads — especially for AI and HPC — outgrow the physical, ... » read more

Data Centers In Space?
By Geoff Tate - 09 Mar, 2026 - Comments: 0

The merger of xAI and SpaceX, the efforts by some startups, and research by Google have raised the question of when there will be data centers in space. The big advantage of space is the plentiful availability of solar energy, in a sun-synchronous orbit. Fig. 1: A possible orbital data center of the future. Source: Wikipedia, Creative Commons. SpaceX’s impressive Starlink uses s... » read more

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