CAPRE’s Digital Infrastructure Round Up For January 21, 2020: Microsoft, Intel, Schneider Electric & More

Check out the latest in deals, new development and innovative strategies in hyperscale, colocation, 5G, cloud migration, cloud services, edge compute, Hybrid IT, power, cooling and energy efficiency for January 17, 2020:

Microsoft will be Carbon Negative by 2030: Microsoft has announced via press release in a blog post that they will go carbon neutral by 2030, and keep upping their game after that. “While the world will need to reach net zero, those of us who can afford to move faster and go further should do so. That’s why today we are announcing an ambitious goal and a new plan to reduce and ultimately remove Microsoft’s carbon footprint. By 2030 Microsoft will be carbon negative, and by 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975,” reads the release. “We recognize that progress requires not just a bold goal but a detailed plan. As described below, we are launching today an aggressive program to cut our carbon emissions by more than half by 2030, both for our direct emissions and for our entire supply and value chain. We will fund this in part by expanding our internal carbon fee, in place since 2012 and increased last year, to start charging not only our direct emissions, but those from our supply and value chains.”

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Intel to Make Cuts in Data Center Group: Oregon Live is reporting that Intel plans to lay off a modest number of staff. “Intel plans to lay off a modest number of employees as it reorganizes the company’s most vital business unit, its data center group, according to sources inside the company,” writes Oregon Live. “Intel hasn’t publicly announced any cuts and declined to comment on its plans. The company reports fourth-quarter results Thursday and is in a mandatory quiet period ahead of that announcement. The layoffs appear to reflect a repositioning of the data center group, which is among Intel’s most profitable. The company has made a number of acquisitions – most recently last month’s $2 billion purchase of an Israeli artificial intelligence company called Habana Labs – to expand the capabilities of its data center technology.”
Niche No More? Cushman & Wakefield Ranks Global Data Center Markets: $100 Billion USD has poured into the data center asset class over the past decade, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s Data Center Market Comparison. This significant capital inflow has been matched by an equally major technical shift, as enterprises have chosen to move workloads off premises, first to colocation facilities and more recently to a mixture of colocation and public and private clouds. This shift has caused the largest cloud platform providers – Amazon, Google and Microsoft – to become the most influential players in many markets, altering data center sizing by a factor of 10. The 10-megawatt (MW) data center that was impressive 10 years ago now pales in comparison to 30-MW leases now signed with increasing regularity.
Schneider Electric Unveils First Integrated Rack with Immersed, Liquid-Cooled IT for Data Centers: Schneider Electric has announced the creation of the industry’s first commercially-available integrated rack with chassis-based, immersive liquid cooling. Optimized for compute-intensive applications, the solution combines a high-powered GPU server with Iceotope’s liquid cooling technology to increase energy efficiency. Avnet integrates the liquid-cooled server with Schneider Electric’s NetShelter liquid-cooled enclosure system for simple deployment into data centers or edge computing environments. The system is EcoStruxure Ready since the solution is available with next generation data center management software, EcoStruxure IT Expert and our digital service EcoStruxure Asset Advisor. This first-of-its-kind liquid-cooled solution is ideal for applications such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning algorithm training development, where high compute demands more energy use.
Incooling and GIGABYTE to Develop a New Class of Two-Phase Liquid-Cooled Servers: Innovation Origins has featured a joint venture by dutch Incooling and Taiwanese GIGABYTE to produce a new class of two-phase liquid-cooled servers. “Incooling’s technology is capable of pushing temperatures far below the traditional data centre air temperatures, unlocking a new class of turbocharged servers. It does this by leveraging specialized refrigerants using phase-change cooling, inside a pressure-controlled loop,” reads the story. “Coupled with the R161 overclockable server from GIGABYTE, Incooling’s solutions will be able to push performance further than ever before. According to the companies, first system tests showed up to 20°C lower core temperatures contributing up to 10% increase in boost clock-speed whilst lowering total power draw by 200 watts…the Taipei-based company invited Incooling to join forces in the development of this innovative cooling system.