Lenovo: Liquid cooling means 30% less energy used

Shifting is 'not as complicated as people may believe', says Lenovo UK&I ISG head Ian Jeffs

As almost every organisation is investing in AI, the demand for compute power has rocketed.

But GPU-equipped servers suitable for AI training workloads run much hotter than their standard counterparts, meaning that they cannot be slotted in as like-to-like replacements into datacentre racks.

At the same time CIOs are under pressure to make their operations more sustainable.

As organisations attempt to square this circle, there has been a surge of interest in liquid cooling, according to Ian Jeffs, UK&I general manager for Lenovo's Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), the hardware giant's datacentre unit.

"If you think of the biggest use of energy, it's fans," Jeffs said. "If you use water cooling you can see a 30% benefit from not using fans. That's 30% less energy full stop."

He continued: "Of course you don't jump straight there if your datacentre isn't set up for water, but it's not as complicated as people may believe."

Previously, interest in water cooling was largely confined to large public sector organisations and research units with HPC facilities, said Jeffs, but in the last 18 months that user base has broadened massively.

"Pretty much everybody is now starting to think about what the future looks like and what they should do."

Lenovo boasts 75 "AI ready" server models and liquid-cooling technology for datacentres in the shape of Neptune, which uses warm water to dissipate heat from components like CPUs, GPUs, memory and storage.

"Direct warm water cooling we believe is the strongest solution there, and we're having that conversation a lot," Jeffs told Computing.

Lenovo, which in recent years has focussed heavily on raising its profile in the datacentre, also offers second-user equipment and end-of-life services to customers looking to reduce their environmental footprint.

But given AI's colossal thirst for energy and hardware, isn't this just tinkering around the edges? Can the gap be bridged? In Lenovo's own recent survey of 600 CIOs, 38% of respondents said that sustainability is being de-prioritised in the push for AI.

Jeffs is a techno-optimist. AI can help optimise processes and improve product designs to make them more efficient, he said, which is how Lenovo is starting to use it.

"Even if you wanted to get rid of ChatGPT you couldn't, so it's how you take advantage of all those things to make a more sustainable world moving forward."

He's certainly not the only one to see the potential of AI in tackling the enormous sustainability challenges we face. AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton recently joined climate startup CuspAI which promises to deliver better materials for carbon capture.

Optimising for AI

However, results in terms of tangible business and environmental benefits have so far been underwhelming.

The Lenovo survey found that while 96% of CIOs are expecting to increase investment in AI, 42% expect to see no positive ROI from AI investments for at least two to three years.

This is due to the newness of the technology, a lack of public trust, a shortage of skills, and the perennial problem of unruly and disorganised back-end data systems, said Jeffs.

"If you've got too much data, all over the place and in different formats then that could be why your AI isn't as successful as you'd have hoped."

Lenovo recently announced partnerships with Cisco, Nutanix and NetApp aimed at specifically at enhancing data management to speed up AI workloads.

It may also be that the technology is being misapplied. In the current hype phase, large, multi-modal models are finding themselves bundled into applications for which they are unsuitable. The potential for optimisation is clear in terms of functionality and energy use is clear, and it's starting to happen.

"I see companies taking these models and making them personal to their companies, or personal to an individual," said Jeffs.

Change at the top at Lenovo ISG

Earlier this month Lenovo announced that ISG's head, Kirk Skaugen, was leaving the company after seven years in post, with CTO Greg Huff and SVP sales Vlad Rozanovich stepping in temporarily. No official reason was given for Skaugen's departure, and Jeffs said he did not know the details. However, it came after a period when the unit had been unprofitable.

In a statement Lenovo said. "While profitability was still under pressure, in our latest quarterly earnings, global ISG revenue achieved positive year-on-year growth with a double-digit growth rate of 15% and set a new Q4 record in history, and in EMEA our YoY revenue grew by 16%.