Texas Instruments (TI) and NVIDIA have joined forces to transform the power infrastructure serving the high-performance, 300 watt (W) to 1 kilowatt (kW)- AI systems in data centers.
The collaboration will concentrate on the enhancement of leading edge power management and sensing technologies for applications including 800V DC distributed power architectures.
The strategic partnership is aimed at servicing the rising power requirements of emerging AI workloads and delivering greater scalability, reliability and energy efficiency for modern data centers.
The transition to 800V DC design is a step change from the 48V applications that are rapidly expanding board power for commercial AI hardware.
Industry experts like to point out that just one rack of 48 volt systems can require an awful lot of copper wiring, which could be somewhat problematic when it comes to manageability – not to mention weight and certainly thermal engineering.
Drawing on TI’s deep power-conversion and sensing expertise, the new 800V architecture design is intended to provide greater power delivery and drastically reduce material use and simplify system complexity in the data center.
Gabriele Gorla, VP of System Engineering, NVIDIA: Semiconductor power system is a very critical element for building high performance AI infrastructure.
NVIDIA is working with partners like TI to lay the groundwork for an 800V DC architecture capable of power much, much higher (and efficient) at the power taps of tomorrow’s AI-driven data centers, he said.
This action is expected to simplifiy data center design, increase energy usage efficiency, expand computational capabilities, and shrink the physical footprint of electrical systems, allowing data centers to tackle the growing computational demands without adding to the infrastructure.
“At the AI data center level, we are seeing a sea change in the industry with the explosion of power requirements,” said Jeffrey Morroni, Director of Power Management R&D at Kilby Labs and a TI Fellow.
48V systems were formerly seen as the next breakthrough, but seeing the two companies’ visions of power innovation expanding, the partnership now establishes 800V systems as the front-runner in the future of high-performance data center power.
The joint development of 800V power distributing systems is anticipated to bring in significant advantages such as minimized power losses, enhanced energy efficiency, and the suitability of smaller equipment in electrical systems within AI data centers.
This collaboration represents a swift moving industry towards high-voltage, high-efficiency reliable systems to support the massive power requirements in new artificial intelligence technologies.
Serving to connect the dots of the world’s growing demand for AI solutions in a faster and more energy-saving way, the TI and NVIDIA consortium will take on the emerging requirement of AI computing, bring the next-generation technology to its next level and transform data center design to new standards.