Colovore announced a 9MW liquid-cooled colocation expansion at its Santa Clara facility.
With AI and HPC workloads becoming the norm, datacenters are pushing toward increasingly powerful cooling technologies. Colovore is building a next-generation liquid-cooled colocation facility in Santa Clara, California, designed specifically for power-hungry AI and HPC systems with rack densities of up to 250kW when it comes online in 2024. "When we opened our doors in 2013, touting 20kW per cabinet in our phase one, many thought power density wasn't a big issue at the time," said Colovore President Sean Holzknecht. "We now support thousands of AI and GPU systems for Fortune 500 companies down to Silicon Valley startups in hundreds of cabinets, each drawing 15-50kW per cab."
Standard colocation facilities typically offer only 7-10kW of capacity per rack, which is sufficient for traditional storage and virtualization servers but inadequate for modern AI systems. The DGX A100, for example, contains two 225W 64-core AMD Eypc 2 processors, eight 400W A100 SXM GPUs, nine 200 Gbit/sec NICs, and a terabyte of system memory in a 5U configuration that draws 6.5kW under full load. Nvidia's upcoming 8U DGX H100 systems, due out early next year, will consume 10.2kWs. Colovore's standard 50kW rack budget can support four 10kW systems while leaving room for networking, but with direct liquid cooling, the company can support rack power budgets up to 250kWs—just under 6kW per rack unit.
To achieve these densities, Colovore employs direct-to-chip liquid cooling (DLC) combined with rear-door heat exchangers. DLC replaces traditional copper heat sinks and high-pressure fans with low-profile cold plates and tubing that carry coolant to each component, enabling far denser configurations while reducing fan power consumption by 13-20 percent. Heat is then transferred to rear-door heat exchangers comprised of large fans and a radiator attached to the back of the server rack.
The approach allows Colovore to operate at a power usage efficiency (PUE) of 1.1, a metric measuring how much of a datacenter's power actually goes toward compute, storage, or networking equipment—the closer to 1.0, the more efficient the facility. As Colovore co-founder Ben Coughlin stated, "Our high-density datacenters allow customers to pack their racks full from top to bottom due to the robust power and cooling infrastructure we deliver. This reduces the total amount of space required, resulting in far lower monthly operating costs and capex, while significantly increasing IT operating efficiency and scalability." The company expects to begin leasing space in the facility starting in the first quarter of 2024, coinciding with volume production of the new generation of high-wattage chips.