AWS updates data centres with new components to support AI innovation and improve energy usage

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added new components to its data centre to support customers’ needs, particularly for generative AI development, and to further improve energy efficiency.

According to AWS, specific improvements include simplifying electrical distribution and mechanical systems. These enable infrastructure availability of 99% and reduce the potential number of racks that can be impacted by electrical issues by 89%.

AWS said it has also developed what it is calling “novel mechanical cooling solutions” that provide configurable liquid-to-chip cooling in both its new and existing data centres. These new cooling systems have also been designed to integrate air and liquid cooling capabilities for AI chipsets, like AWS Trainium2 and rack-scale AI supercomputing solutions like NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, as well as AWS’s network switches and storage servers.

The new components, according to the tech giant, have also been developed with sustainability in mind, as it’s touted to reduce mechanical energy consumption by 46% and bring the amount of embodied carbon in the concrete used down by 35% drop.

Improving high-density AI workloads in AWS data centres

AWS added that to support high-density AI workloads it has repositioned its data centre racks to maximise power usage, by using software AI-powered software that predicts the most efficient way to land servers. Doing this, AWS said it has reduced the amount of stranded power – energy that is available but unused or underutilised – and made use of available energy.

With these updates, AWS believes its data centres can now provide 12% more computing power.

“AWS continues to relentlessly innovate its infrastructure to build the most performant, resilient, secure, and sustainable cloud for customers worldwide,” said AWS Infrastructure Services Vice President Prasad Kalyanaraman. 

“These datacentre capabilities represent an important step forward with increased energy efficiency and flexible support for emerging workloads,” he added.

“But what is even more exciting is that they are designed to be modular, so that we are able to retrofit our existing infrastructure for liquid cooling and energy efficiency to power generative AI applications and lower our carbon footprint.”

These new capabilities will be implemented globally in AWS’s new data centres, with many components already deployed in its existing data centres.

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