Skip to main content

Nvidia’s new liquid-cooled GPUs are heading to data centers

Nvidia is taking some notes from the enthusiast PC building crowd in an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers. The company announced two new liquid-cooled GPUs during its Computex 2022 keynote, but they won’t be making their way into your next gaming PC.

Instead, the H100 (announced at GTC earlier this year) and A100 GPUs will ship as part of HGX server racks toward the end of the year. Liquid cooling isn’t new for the world of supercomputers, but mainstream data center servers haven’t traditionally been able to access this efficient cooling method (not without trying to jerry-rig a gaming GPU into a server, that is).

Nvidia A100 liquid-cooled data center GPU.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

In addition to HGX server racks, Nvidia will offer the liquid-cooled versions of the H100 and A100 as slot-in PCIe cards. The A100 is coming in the second half of 2022, and the H100 is coming in early 2023. Nvidia says “at least a dozen” system builders will have these GPUs available by the end of the year, including options from Asus, ASRock, and Gigabyte.

Recommended Videos

Data centers account for around 1% of the world’s total electricity usage, and nearly half of that electricity is spent solely on cooling everything in the data center. As opposed to traditional air cooling, Nvidia says its new liquid-cooled cards can reduce power consumption by around 30% while reducing rack space by 66%.

Instead of an all-in-one system like you’d find on a liquid-cooled gaming GPU, the A100 and H100 use a direct liquid connection to the processing unit itself. Everything but the feed lines is hidden in the GPU enclosure, which itself only takes up one PCIe slot (as opposed to two for the air-cooled versions).

Data centers look at power usage effectiveness (PUE) to gauge energy usage — essentially a ratio between how much power a data center is drawing versus how much power the computing is using. With an air-cooled data center, Equinix had a PUE of about 1.6. Liquid cooling with Nvidia’s new GPUs brought that down to 1.15, which is remarkably close to the 1.0 PUE data centers aim for.

Energy usage for Nvidia liquid-cooled data center GPUs.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

In addition to better energy efficiency, Nvidia says liquid cooling provides benefits for preserving water. The company says millions of gallons of water are evaporated in data centers each year to keep air-cooled systems operating. Liquid cooling allows that water to recirculate, turning “a waste into an asset,” according to head of edge infrastructure at Equinix Zac Smith.

Although these cards won’t show up in the massive data centers run by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — which are likely using liquid cooling already — that doesn’t mean they won’t have an impact. Banks, medical institutions, and data center providers like Equinix compromise a large portion of the data centers around today, and they could all benefit from liquid-cooled GPUs.

Nvidia says this is just the start of a journey to carbon-neutral data centers, as well. In a press release, Nvidia senior product marketing manager Joe Delaere wrote that the company plans “to support liquid cooling in our high-performance data center GPUs and our Nvidia HGX platforms for the foreseeable future.”

Jacob Roach
Former Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
Acer’s new gaming laptop bring Nvidia RTX 40-series GPUs under $1,000
Two Acer gaming laptops over a dark blue background.

You can find Nvidia's RTX 40-series graphics cards in some of the best gaming laptops, but the downside is that they're all expensive, if not overpriced. Previously, that meant you'd be forced to choose between getting something affordable or getting access to Nvidia's GPU cheat code -- DLSS 3. Now, there's finally some hope on the horizon, as Acer is launching a budget-friendly laptop that can still run modern games. We're talking about the Acer Nitro V 15.

The new laptop will be available in a few different configurations, each equipped with Intel's latest 13th-Gen CPUs, including either Core i5 or Core i7 models. All of them also come with a 15.6-inch 144Hz display. While every configuration also features a Nvidia graphics card, not all of those GPUs are equally thrilling. The cheapest model, priced at $700, features a Core i5-13420H CPU and an RTX 2050 GPU. This comes paired with just 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.

Read more
Nvidia is cheating with its GPUs, and that’s great for laptops
A game playing on the Razer Blade 14 gaming laptop.

With some AI trickery, Nvidia has managed to cheat the traditional rendering pipeline for games. And that makes traditionally underpowered laptops so much better.

Its latest RTX 40-series mobile GPUs are very powerful -- especially if you jump up to the RTX 4090 in a machine like the Asus Strix Scar 17. But it’s the low-end options where Nvidia is really pushing ahead. That isn’t due to raw power, but instead Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), Nvidia's AI-powered upscaling and frame generation tech.

Read more
Nvidia’s DLSS 3.5 update flips ray tracing on its head
Cyberpunk 2077 running on the Samsung Odyssey OLED G8.

Nvidia introduced its Deep Learning Super Sampling 3 (DLSS 3) not too long ago, but the feature is already getting a major update. DLSS 3.5 will launch this fall, seemingly alongside Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, and it adds something totally new to Nvidia's storied RTX feature.

Ray Reconstruction is what's new. At a high level, Ray Reconstruction enables greater levels of ray tracing quality without hurting your performance (in some cases, it can even improve performance). Nvidia is billing this as an image quality improvement over traditional ray tracing methods, not as a way to improve performance, however.

Read more