At its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS introduced several data center innovations aimed at enhancing energy efficiency, supporting generative AI workloads, and meeting customer demands for high-density computing. These innovations feature modular designs that improve sustainability and accommodate both new and existing infrastructure globally. The upgrades include optimized electrical systems, liquid cooling, and advanced control mechanisms to maximize performance while reducing environmental impact.
The new electrical and mechanical designs enhance availability by reducing potential failure points and boosting energy efficiency. AWS’s use of liquid cooling for high-density AI workloads marks a significant shift, enabling seamless integration of air and liquid cooling technologies. Additionally, improved rack designs and power delivery systems promise a sixfold increase in rack density over two years, with another threefold increase planned. These changes enable AWS to deliver 12% more compute power per site and reduce the overall number of data centers needed.
AWS also prioritized sustainability, cutting mechanical energy consumption by 46% and embodied carbon in concrete by 35%. Backup generators now use renewable diesel, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90%. With these advancements, AWS continues to position itself as a leader in building infrastructure tailored to the demands of AI and high-performance computing.
Key points:
• Simplified electrical designs reduce energy loss and improve reliability, achieving 99.9999% infrastructure availability.
• Liquid cooling supports AI chipsets like AWS Trainium2 and NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, with multimodal cooling for traditional and AI workloads.
• Rack designs allow a 6x increase in power density within two years, scaling to a 9x increase later.
• Mechanical energy usage drops by 46%, while embodied carbon in concrete is reduced by 35%.
• Backup generators transition to renewable diesel, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 90%.
“AWS relentlessly innovates to deliver the most sustainable and secure cloud infrastructure,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, AWS Vice President of Infrastructure Services. “These modular designs support generative AI and reduce our carbon footprint, ensuring customers can innovate with confidence.”
“AWS continues to relentlessly innovate its infrastructure to build the most performant, resilient, secure, and sustainable cloud for customers worldwide,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS. “These data center capabilities represent an important step forward with increased energy efficiency and flexible support for emerging workloads. 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.”
AWS has been building large-scale data centers for 18 years and GPU-based servers for AI workloads for 13 years.
