Latest news with #AnthonyRobinson
Forbes
17-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How Startup Solutions Can Help Cut Data Center Energy Consumption
Nexalus Co-Founders (L to R) - Dr. Cathal Wilson (COO), Professor Anthony Robinson (CSO) & Kenneth ... More O'Mahony (CEO) Everyone in the power generation business is talking about the huge increase in data center energy consumption. The IEA released a report on April 10th saying that data center energy use would double in the next five years, with a 4x increase in energy required to run AI models. The IEA forecasts that by 2030, data center energy demand will exceed the aggregate energy demand of the entire nation of Japan. The climate impact of this power consumption cannot be overstated. Some portion of energy generation capacity will be provided by clean energy sources, but the projected jump in demand is so large that utilities are postponing decommissioning of large-carbon-footprint coal-fired plants. Nexalus, a startup based in Ireland, the data center capital of Europe, has developed an innovative way to lower data center power consumption by over one-third, using the 'waste heat' from these facilities to do other useful work, thereby lowering overall electricity consumption and fossil fuel demand. You would think that most of the energy consumed by a data center powers its servers. Think again. The industry metric PUE (power usage effectiveness) is the ratio of data center facility power use to the amount of power going to the servers. According to the U.S. EPA, the average PUE for a domestic data center is 2.0, meaning that a data center uses two watts of power for every one watt used by its servers. Where does the other half of the energy go? Mainly, it goes into cooling the servers' chips, which heat up while performing 50 trillion floating-point calculations per second so you and your coworkers can enjoy doctored images of a Cybertruck crushed by a block of cheese. This is why you see so many air conditioner compressors in photos of data centers. This Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa shows a typical data center design. Servers are ... More housed in the rectangular warehouse building. Much of the infrastructure to the right of the warehouse is equipment to cool the data center and the warehouse must also be very large for air handling systems. Cooling systems essentially double data center energy consumption. Nexalus has made breakthrough improvements to direct liquid cooling of processors, a technology especially useful for chips under intense AI computing loads. Legacy DLC systems pump water through microchannel arrays or flow low-boiling-point refrigerants onto a cold plate that sits atop servers' chips. The liquid carries away heat as it flows over the chips. Two firms using the water-based DLC model are CoolIT from Canada and Asetek from Denmark. The main selling point of refrigerant-based designs (one prominent manufacturer of this model is the Israeli firm Zutacore) is that they do not use high-pressure water flows, so the perceived risk to equipment from leakage is lower. While water's physical properties make it a better coolant than synthetic refrigerants, legacy water-based systems have a big disadvantage: cold plate microchannels are so thin that larger high-pressure pumps must be used to counteract the friction between the water and the plate, requiring more energy and posing a greater risk of server damage in the event of a leak. Nexalus's solution is to surround the chip with a watertight shroud containing tiny high-velocity water jets which strike the cold plate perpendicularly at the precise areas where the chip runs hottest, rather than running water evenly through microchannels over the entire chip. A Nexalus shroud built for a popular type of Dell server. Nexalus's innovative water-cooling ... More technology can cut data center energy consumption by 35%. This precise high-pressure flow cools the chip more effectively, and the lack of microchannels reduces the pumping pressure and attendant pumping power by a factor of 25. These two innovations reduce data center power demand considerably, but the development team at Nexalus has rethought server case design to cut power draw even more and create a circular system for the heat pulled out of server cases. In most data centers, servers are air-cooled. Even DLC systems only use water to cool the hottest components—the chips themselves—and cool everything else with air, making a server room about as loud as a subway car going through a station. Air-cooling components require air handling and conditioning systems that run around the clock. These systems use a lot of water, which is lost to the atmosphere when heat is drawn out of the building. Nexalus's air-tight server cases feature internal fans that direct heat to water lines which also draw heat away from circuitry. This water joins with the water from the chip-cooling systems at an average temperature of around 60°C (140°F), then flows to a heat exchanger, where it is cooled. The cold water then flows back to cool the servers. The system is a closed loop, drastically reducing data server water usage, an important environmental issue when data centers are built in arid areas. Nexalus provides the 140°F waste heat from the exchanger to local businesses or municipalities in a form that can be used in industrial applications or for district heating with nearly zero energy lost in the process. Recovered heat used for other applications represents power that does not need to be generated by burning fossil fuels or pulled off the electrical grid, so a fully integrated Nexalus-equipped data center would relieve grid congestion and reduce overall carbon footprints. Laws in several European countries were recently changed to require the use of heat recovery systems before a municipality will sign off on data center development plans, so Nexalus's solution is well-placed for future projects. Nexalus claims that its DLC systems can reduce the carbon footprint of a typical data center by 23,000 metric tons per year, and an additional 24,000 metric tons can be offset through the waste heat recovery process. Co-founder and CEO Ken O'Mahony spoke with me off the record about the firm's incipient partnership announcements. Suffice it to say that I was impressed. The firm has publicly announced a deal with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise to integrate its cooling system with three of HPE's leading server models, and I expect further announcements with other top-tier server manufacturers and data center developers. The Nexalus team in December 2024. Nexalus is intent on cutting data center power consumption using ... More its innovative cooling technology. O'Mahony told me that the company was also receiving interest from telecom providers looking to push more computing power nearer to end users. 'Edge computing' is a hot topic, and O'Mahony believes Nexalus's self-contained, small-footprint systems can help facilitate it. I do not fly private jets, but I do love my subscription to a popular LLM. I feel a twinge of climate guilt whenever I ask it a question, however, because I know my query stokes data center energy consumption. O'Mahony and his colleagues at Nexalus know how important it is to reduce data center carbon footprints while facilitating the growing use of AI technology. We must all balance business imperatives with climate constraints in this post-Climate world. Intelligent investors take note.
Forbes
17-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Nexalus Provides A Cool Solution To Cut Data Center Energy Consumption
Nexalus Co-Founders (L to R) - Dr. Cathal Wilson (COO), Professor Anthony Robinson (CSO) & Kenneth ... More O'Mahony (CEO) Everyone in the power generation business is talking about the huge increase in data center energy consumption. The IEA released a report on April 10th saying that data center energy use would double in the next five years, with a 4x increase in energy required to run AI models. The IEA forecasts that by 2030, data center energy demand will exceed the aggregate energy demand of the entire nation of Japan. The climate impact of this power consumption cannot be overstated. Some portion of energy generation capacity will be provided by clean energy sources, but the projected jump in demand is so large that utilities are postponing decommissioning of large-carbon-footprint coal-fired plants. Nexalus, a startup based in Ireland, the data center capital of Europe, has developed an innovative way to lower data center power consumption by over one-third, using the 'waste heat' from these facilities to do other useful work, thereby lowering overall electricity consumption and fossil fuel demand. You would think that most of the energy consumed by a data center powers its servers. Think again. The industry metric PUE (power usage effectiveness) is the ratio of data center facility power use to the amount of power going to the servers. According to the U.S. EPA, the average PUE for a domestic data center is 2.0, meaning that a data center uses two watts of power for every one watt used by its servers. Where does the other half of the energy go? Mainly, it goes into cooling the servers' chips, which heat up while performing 50 trillion floating-point calculations per second so you and your coworkers can enjoy doctored images of a Cybertruck crushed by a block of cheese. This is why you see so many air conditioner compressors in photos of data centers. This Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa shows a typical data center design. Servers are ... More housed in the rectangular warehouse building. Much of the infrastructure to the right of the warehouse is equipment to cool the data center and the warehouse must also be very large for air handling systems. Cooling systems essentially double data center energy consumption. Nexalus has made breakthrough improvements to direct liquid cooling of processors, a technology especially useful for chips under intense AI computing loads. Legacy DLC systems pump water or low-boiling-point refrigerants through microchannel arrays within a cold plate that sits atop servers' chips. The liquid carries away heat as it flows over the chips. Two firms using the DLC model are CoolIT from Canada and Asetek from Denmark. The main selling point of refrigerant-based designs (one prominent manufacturer of this model is the Israeli firm Zutacore) is that they do not use high-pressure water flows, so the perceived risk to equipment from leakage is lower. While water's physical properties make it a better coolant than synthetic refrigerants, legacy water-based systems have a big disadvantage: cold plate microchannels are so thin that larger high-pressure pumps must be used to counteract the friction between the water and the plate, requiring more energy and posing a greater risk of server damage in the event of a leak. Nexalus's solution is to surround the chip with a watertight shroud containing tiny high-velocity water jets which strike the cold plate perpendicularly at the precise areas where the chip runs hottest, rather than running water evenly through microchannels over the entire chip. A Nexalus shroud built for a popular type of Dell server. Nexalus's innovative water-cooling ... More technology can cut data center energy consumption by 35%. This precise high-pressure flow cools the chip more effectively, and the lack of microchannels reduces the pumping pressure and attendant pumping power by a factor of 25. These two innovations reduce data center power demand considerably, but the development team at Nexalus has rethought server case design to cut power draw even more and create a circular system for the heat pulled out of server cases. In most data centers, servers are air-cooled. Even DLC systems only use water to cool the hottest components—the chips themselves—and cool everything else with air, making a server room about as loud as a subway car going through a station. Air-cooling components require air handling and conditioning systems run around the clock. These systems use a lot of water, which is lost to the atmosphere when heat is drawn out of the building. Nexalus's air-tight server cases feature internal fans that direct heat to water lines which also draw heat away from circuitry. This water joins with the water from the chip-cooling systems at an average temperature of around 60°C (140°F), then flows to a heat exchanger, where it is cooled. The cold water then flows back to cool the servers. The system is a closed loop, drastically reducing data server water usage, an important environmental issue when data centers are built in arid areas. Nexalus provides the 140°F waste heat from the exchanger to local businesses or municipalities in a form that can be used in industrial applications or for district heating with nearly zero energy lost in the process. Recovered heat used for other applications represents power that does not need to be generated by burning fossil fuels or pulled off the electrical grid, so a fully integrated Nexalus-equipped data center would relieve grid congestion and reduce overall carbon footprints. Laws in several European countries were recently changed to require the use of heat recovery systems before a municipality will sign off on data center development plans, so Nexalus's solution is well-placed for future projects. Nexalus claims that its DLC systems can reduce the carbon footprint of a typical data center by 23,000 metric tons per year, and an additional 24,000 metric tons can be offset through the waste heat recovery process. Co-founder and CEO Ken O'Mahony spoke with me off the record about the firm's incipient partnership announcements. Suffice it to say that I was impressed. The firm has publicly announced a deal with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise to integrate its cooling system with three of HPE's leading server models, and I expect further announcements with other top-tier server manufacturers and data center developers. The Nexalus team in December 2024. Nexalus is intent on cutting data center power consumption using ... More its innovative cooling technology. O'Mahony told me that the company was also receiving interest from telecom providers looking to push more computing power nearer to end users. 'Edge computing' is a hot topic, and O'Mahony believes Nexalus's self-contained, small-footprint systems can help facilitate it. I do not fly private jets, but I do love my subscription to a popular LLM. I feel a twinge of climate guilt whenever I ask it a question, however, because I know my query stokes data center energy consumption. O'Mahony and his colleagues at Nexalus know how important it is to reduce data center carbon footprints while facilitating the growing use of AI technology. We must all balance business imperatives with climate constraints in this post-Climate world. Intelligent investors take note.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Scotlandville mourns the loss of inspiring teen killed in tragic shooting
BATON ROUGE, La. (Louisiana First) — Friends, family, staff, community members, and classmates gathered Friday to mourn the loss of 17-year-old Anthony Robinson, a student at Scotlandville Magnet High School. Those who attended the memorial described Robinson as one of a kind—positive, inspiring, intelligent, and a safe space for many. 'I truly want to thank his family for coming out and raising him the way he was raised,' said Scotlandville student Taylah Bickham. 'He was an amazing young man.' 'Anthony, for a lot of people here, he was a symbol of peace for everybody,' said Raymond Russell, also a Scotlandville student. A close friend shared that Robinson was known for his problem-solving abilities and his willingness to help anyone who asked for advice. They added that Robinson had aspirations of becoming a therapist. 'He just really had that character about him like no matter what you were going through, no matter what kind of problem you had whether it was school, work, situation, relationship, whatever you had. He always had a solution for you, no matter what it was,' said his friend and classmate Marvell Chapman. 'He wanted to grow up to be a therapist. I just know he would've helped so many people in his career path.' Robinson was shot on Monday as he got off the school bus. BRPD believes the shooting may have stemmed from a prior argument between Robinson and the 16-year-old suspect. Robinson's uncle hopes this tragedy serves as a reminder that gun violence is never the solution. District 2 council member Anthony Kenney emphasized that message during the memorial, speaking to the students and calling for change to create a better future. 'Young people, we just finished celebrating black history,' said Kenney. 'If we talk about what happened in the past, if you are not stepping up to the plate and hold each other together accountable, for each other's actions, we will not have any black history to create. We have to be the ones that stand in the gap to make sure nobody else mother has to bury their child.' To support the family, donations can be made through their GoFundMe page. Louisiana faith leaders urge Gov. Landry to halt executions Scotlandville mourns the loss of inspiring teen killed in tragic shooting Google dumping Assistant for AI-powered 'Gemini' Doechii joins Will Smith to recreate viral TikTok trend Trump targets DOJ in first visit, pledges 'Law and Order' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Yahoo
GoFundMe created for family of Baton Rouge teen fatally shot after getting off school bus
BATON ROUGE, La. (Louisiana First) — A GoFundMe was created to raise money for the family of a Baton Rouge teen boy who was shot and killed by another teenager. Sctolandville High School student Anthony Robinson, 17, was shot and killed before 3 p.m. March 10 after he got off the school bus. Detectives believe it was a targeted shooting. The fundraiser has raised nearly $2,000 as of Friday morning before noon. The description written by the victim's aunt said he 'had the brightest future ahead' of him. A 16-year-old suspect was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder and illegal use of weapons. District 2 Metro Councilmember Anthony Kenney called for local and state officials to address youth violence. He said he wants to address the root of why youth are resorting to crime. Baton Rouge Police sees increase in youth violent crimes Police said an investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information is asked to contact BRPD's Violent Crimes Unit at 225-389-4869 or Crime Stoppers at 225-344-7867. DHS revokes visa of one Columbia student, arrests another Injuries to freshman star Cooper Flagg, Maliq Brown hit at inopportune time for No. 1 Duke Baton Rouge man faces attempted murder, drive-by shooting charges GoFundMe created for family of Baton Rouge teen fatally shot after getting off school bus St. Patrick's Day weekend weather: Rain, strong winds, tornado risk Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
