At the OCP 2025 EMEA Summit, Google unveiled major infrastructure innovations to power the next wave of AI workloads, including a shift to +/-400 VDC power delivery capable of supporting up to 1 megawatt per IT rack and the open sourcing of its next-generation liquid cooling solution, Project Deschutes. These advances aim to support the explosive growth of AI compute demands, which are expected to surpass 500 kW per rack before the end of the decade. Google is collaborating with Meta and Microsoft under the Mt Diablo project to standardize this new high-voltage power architecture, leveraging the mature EV supply chain for scale and efficiency.
In parallel, Google announced plans to contribute its fifth-generation cooling distribution unit (CDU) to the Open Compute Project. Drawing on nearly a decade of deployment experience with TPU liquid cooling, the Deschutes CDU design enables extremely high availability—99.999% uptime across more than 2,000 TPU pods. The disaggregated cooling approach isolates rack and facility loops and uses cold plates, manifolds, and flexible hoses to manage thermal loads from chips now exceeding 1,000W. Together, these technologies represent the next frontier in AI infrastructure design, driving greater power density, thermal performance, and serviceability across hyperscale deployments.
- Google introduces +/-400 VDC power architecture to support up to 1 MW per rack, replacing legacy 48 VDC systems
- AC-to-DC sidecar power racks separate power components from the IT rack, boosting power efficiency by ~3%
- High-voltage standardization is being developed with Meta and Microsoft via the Mt Diablo project at OCP; draft spec coming May 2025
- Google to contribute Project Deschutes (5th-gen CDU) to OCP to accelerate liquid cooling adoption
- Deschutes enables 99.999% uptime and supports compact, cold-plate cooled designs ideal for AI accelerators
- Google first deployed liquid cooling with TPU v3 in 2018; latest deployments include TPU v5 and Ironwood
- Liquid-cooled servers reduce size, double chip density, and outperform air cooling in thermal and hydraulic performance
- Water conducts heat ~4,000x more efficiently and has ~30x better thermal conductivity than air
- Google calls for industry-wide adoption of +/-400 VDC and Deschutes architecture to prepare for future AI scale
“With the accelerating pace of AI hardware development, we must collectively quicken our pace to prepare data centers for what’s next… The most impactful innovations are still ahead.” — Madhusudan Iyengar & Amber Huffman, Principal Engineers, Google
