Power demands of data centers have grown from tens to 200 kilowatts in just a few years, a pace that has data center developers scrambling to design future facilities that can handle the load.
“In the next couple of years, it’s going to be 600 kilowatts, and then we’re going to a megawatt,” Tim Heidel, CEO of Veir, told TechCrunch. “We’re speaking to folks that are now trying to wrap their heads around the architecture for how you design data centers that have multi-megawatt racks.”
At those scales, even the low-voltage cables that bring power to the racks start to take up too much space and generate too much heat.
To rein that in, Veir has adapted its superconducting electrical cables to bring them inside the data center. The Microsoft-backed startup’s first product will be a cable system capable of carrying 3 megawatts of low-voltage electricity.
To demonstrate the technology, Veir built a simulated data center near its headquarters in Massachusetts. The cables will be piloted in data centers next year in advance of an expected 2027 commercial launch, Heidel said.
Superconductors are a class of materials that can conduct electricity with zero loss of energy. The only hitch is that they need to be cooled well below freezing temperatures.
Veir had previously focused on using superconductors to improve capacity on long-distance transmission lines. But utilities are cautious and tend to be slow to adopt new technology. While there’s still a good chance utilities will eventually tap superconductors for high-demand transmission lines, that transition is a bit farther in the future.
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“The pace at which the data center community is moving, evolving, growing, scaling, and tackling challenges is far higher than the transmission community,” Heidel said.
Veir has been in talks with data centers for years. Recently, the tenor of those conversations changed.
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