DOE invests millions in funding for cooling solution projects

As the imperative to decarbonize data becomes clearer, the U.S. the Department of Energy (DOE) has announced it will invest $40 million in funding for 15 projects for the development of high-performance, energy-efficient cooling solutions for data centers.

The department outlined that data center cooling can account for up to 40% of data center energy usage overall, and the selected projects will be working to lower this figure. Projects from the following companies and institutions have been selected for the program:

Flexnode (Bethesda, MD) - Award amount: $3,500,000
HP (Corvallis, OR) - Award amount: $3,250,000
HRL Laboratories (Malibu, CA) - Award amount: $2,000,000
Intel Federal (Austin, TX) - Award amount: $1,711,416
JETCOOL Technologies (Littleton, MA) - Award amount: $1,265,747
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (Golden, CO) Award amount: $1,463,319
Nvidia (Santa Clara, CA) Award amount: $5,000,000
Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN) Award amount: $1,881,315
Raytheon Technologies Research Center (East Hartford, CT) Award amount: $2,504,024
University of California, Davis (Davis, CA) Award amount: $3,586,473
University of Florida (Gainesville, FL) Award amount: $3,042,417
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Champaign, IL) Award amount: $2,500,000
University of Maryland (College Park, MD) Award amount: $3,484,484
University of Missouri (Columbia, MO)Award amount: $1,649,290
University of Texas at Arlington (Arlington, TX) Award amount: $2,843,223

The projects will work on everything from developing aggressive liquid cooling solutions to making two-phase immersion cooling systems more effective and finding ways to address the growing need for advanced thermal management solutions for high-power data centers.

Commenting on the investment, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said that climate change, including severe weather events, threatens the functionality of data centers critical to connecting computing and network infrastructure that power our everyday lives. Further, he said that the DOE is funding projects that will ensure the continued operation of data centers while minimizing carbon emissions to mitigate climate change and reach the country's goal for a clean energy future.