The Thermal And Power Realities Of The AI Era


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


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


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


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


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?


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

Edge And Micro Data Centers: Powering The Real-Time Digital World


The modern world no longer runs on delayed responses. It runs on immediacy. When a self-driving vehicle identifies a pedestrian, when a factory robot adjusts production in milliseconds, or when an augmented reality overlay appears instantly during remote surgery, there is no tolerance for latency. These applications demand data processing that happens almost at the speed of human reflexes. B... » read more

Verifying Scale-Up And Scale-Out In Data Centers


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss challenges and solutions for data center build-out and build-up with Gordon Allan, Siemens EDA director of verification IP; Rishi Chugh, vice president of product marketing for network switching at Marvell; Saravanan Kalinagasamy, senior director of ASIC design and validation at Astera Labs; and Jalaj Gupta, product engineering lead at Siemens EDA. ... » read more

Data Center Digital Twins: How Simulation Improves Design And Performance


Data center digital twins are transforming data center design from assumption-based planning to physics-backed simulation—well before the first rack is deployed. By combining physics simulations with real operational data, a data center digital twin enables teams to predict performance, reduce risk, and optimize capacity with measurable confidence. As power densities rise from AI and hype... » read more

The Race Begins For Much Bigger Abstractions In Data Centers


Key Takeaways Data center build-out is enabling much larger and more complex abstractions. Competition is building for digital/virtual twins across multiple industry segments, including automotive, aerospace, and chip manufacturing. AI, and particularly AI agents, will play a significant role in sorting through data to find potential trouble spots. The frenzy of new data cen... » read more

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