Castrol, better known for its engine oil, has partnered with cooling specialist Submer to drive the adoption of immersion cooling for datacenter and edge applications.

For those of a certain age, Castrol will forever be associated with TV ads that proclaimed its Castrol GTX product as not just oil, but "liquid engineering." Now, however, it is teaming up with Submer to promote liquid immersion cooling as a way towards more efficient and more sustainable datacenter operations.

The two companies said they will work together on the global supply, development and standardization of next generation immersion cooling fluids. These are typically so-called dielectric fluids that conduct heat but not electricity, enabling components such as server motherboards to be cooled by being completely immersed in the fluid.

This union will combine Castrol's thermal management know-how with Submer's background in immersion cooling systems, with the pair claiming that water usage and the power consumption to operate and cool server equipment can be significantly reduced by turning to immersion cooling.

"Teaming up with Submer is a great example of how cooperation can help deliver more efficient operations and can bring about many opportunities for us to continue to deliver products that help save energy whilst delivering high-performance with increased efficiency," said Rebecca Yates, VP for advanced mobility and industrial products at BP, Castrol's parent company.

Submer CEO and co-founder Daniel Pope claimed there are two key drivers for switching to a different medium from the air cooling still widely used in many IT environments. One is a technical need driven by upcoming generations of high-density computer chips that will require more cooling capacity than existing technology can deliver, while the other is the need to deliver more sustainable datacenters.

"Thanks to immersion cooling we can run these digital infrastructures with considerably reduced energy and space typically required," Pope said. Additionally, the heat can be recovered and reused for other purposes, such as domestic heating, he added.

Submer announced another partnership earlier this month with German server maker RNT Rausch to provide immersion cooling for customers of RNT's server and storage systems.

Castrol said that its immersion cooling fluids are designed for single-phase immersion cooling schemes, where the dielectric fluid is pumped through a heat exchanger to transfer the heat to a water-cooling circuit. It also claimed its products have lower viscosity than conventional dielectric fluids, with high oxidation resistance for long-term stability over the lifetime of the fluid. ®

Microsoft and power management specialist Eaton are working together on "grid-interactive UPS technology" using Eaton's EnergyAware UPS systems to help electricity grids with the transition to renewable energy.

The two companies already had a partnership where Eaton used Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform for products including an energy management circuit breaker smart safety device, and the pair jointly released a white paper last year on the potential role of grid-interactive datacenters in grid decarbonization.

Comment It's hard to suppress an eyeroll when the world's largest consumers of datacenter resources talk about sustainability. Putting the planet ahead of profits is often not at the top of the to-do list in large-scale, performance-driven environments.

Sure, the hyperscalers talk a good game. Carbon offsets, green bonds, and lofty carbon neutrality targets aren't nothing. But it's also the kind of thing that can only be measured on a spreadsheet. And it's certainly not the kind of tangible change that's needed.

It's great that these companies are offsetting their energy use by funding renewable energy projects, but it hardly feels sincere when your datacenters are still rolling coal.

Power and thermal management equipment essential to building datacenters is in short supply, with delays of months on shipments – a situation that's likely to persist well into 2023, Dell'Oro Group reports.

The analyst firm's latest datacenter physical infrastructure report – which tracks an array of basic but essential components such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), thermal management systems, IT racks, and power distribution units – found that manufacturers' shipments accounted for just one to two percent of datacenter physical infrastructure revenue growth during the first quarter.

"Unit shipments, for the most part, were flat to low single-digit growth," Dell'Oro analyst Lucas Beran told The Register.

The major hyperscalers and cloud providers are forecast to spend 25 percent more on datacenter infrastructure this year to $18 billion following record investments in the opening three months of 2022.

This is according to Dell’Oro Group research, which found new cloud deployments and higher per-unit infrastructure costs underpinned capex spending in Q1, which grew at its fastest pace in nearly three years, the report found.

Datacenter spending is expected to receive an additional boost later this year as the top four cloud providers expand their services to as many as 30 new regions and memory prices trend upward ahead of Intel and AMD’s next-gen processor families, Dell’Oro analyst Baron Fung told The Register

Transitioning just half of all datacenters to sustainable operating models could cut global energy costs by $7 billion, Supermicro CEO Charles Liang claims.

Building greener datacenters was a central theme of the company’s nearly hour-long Computex keynote earlier this month, where Liang touted Supermicro’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions through modular server design and encouraging liquid cooling.

“It’s our responsibility to reduce the environmental impact of technology by using less power, reducing carbon footprint and e-waste,” he said.

Cisco's Nexus Cloud will eventually allow customers to manage their datacenter networks entirely from the cloud, says the networking giant.

The company unveiled the latest addition to its datacenter-focused Nexus portfolio at Cisco Live this week, where the product set got a software-as-a-service (SaaS) revamp.

"It's targeted at network operations teams that need to manage, or want to manage, their Nexus infrastructure as well as their public-cloud network infrastructure in one spot," Cisco's Thomas Scheibe – VP product management, cloud networking for Nexus & ACI product lines – told The Register.

Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.

It's quite an ambitious goal, given Nvidia's dominance in the space with its GPUs and the CUDA programming model, plus the increasing competition from Intel and several other companies.

But as executives laid out during AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event last week, the resurgent chip designer believes it has the right silicon and software coming into place to pursue the wider AI space.

Oracle has slimmed down its on-prem fully managed cloud offer to a smaller datacenter footprint for a sixth of the budget.

Snappily dubbed OCI Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, the service was launched in 2020 and promised to run a private cloud inside a customer's datacenter, or one run by a third party. Paid for "as-a-service," the concept promised customers the flexibility of moving workloads seamlessly between the on-prem system and Oracle's public cloud for a $6 million annual fee and a minimum commitment of three years.

Big Red has now slashed the fee for a scaled-down version of its on-prem cloud to $1 million a year for a minimum period of four years.

After taking serious CPU market share from Intel over the last few years, AMD has revealed larger ambitions in AI, datacenters and other areas with an expanded roadmap of CPUs, GPUs and other kinds of chips for the near future.

These ambitions were laid out at AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event on Thursday, where it signaled intentions to become a tougher competitor for Intel, Nvidia and other chip companies with a renewed focus on building better and faster chips for servers and other devices, becoming a bigger player in AI, enabling applications with improved software, and making more custom silicon.  

"These are where we think we can win in terms of differentiation," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in opening remarks at the event. "It's about compute technology leadership. It's about expanding datacenter leadership. It's about expanding our AI footprint. It's expanding our software capability. And then it's really bringing together a broader custom solutions effort because we think this is a growth area going forward."

In the world of fabless chip designers, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm usually soak up the most attention since their chips are fueling everything from top-end supercomputers to mobile devices.

This hunger for compute is what has allowed all three companies to grow revenue in the high double digits recently. But there's one fabless chip designer that is growing faster among the largest in the world and it's far from a household name: Marvell Technology.

Silicon Valley-based Marvell grew semiconductor revenue by 72 percent to $1.4 billion in the first quarter, which made it the fastest growing out of the top 10 largest fabless chip designers during that period, according to financials compiled by Taiwanese research firm TrendForce.

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