ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) plans to pilot an artificial intelligence-based autonomous control system for cooling.
The company will test the system from US startup Phaidra, founded by former DeepMind developers who worked on Google's AI data center cooling systems. That system cut data center PUE by 15 percent.
“Combining our expertise in delivering AI-ready data centers across major economic hubs with Phaidra’s industry-leading know-how in using AI to optimize mission-critical control systems, we are leading the way in using AI to further drive sustainability within our data centers," Daniel Pointon, group CTO at STT GDC, said.
"Through this collaboration, we are not only seeing meaningful impact on our ongoing decarbonization efforts, but also significant efficiency gains in data center operations that already offer a hybrid of both air and liquid cooling. This pilot is a testament to our commitment to drive sustainable innovation across our data centers."
The trial will focus on a Singaporean data center with both air-cooling and liquid-cooling solutions, and the two companies are expected to initially reduce cooling energies by 10 percent. After the AI model has been fed more operational data, that saving is expected to jump to up to 30 percent. Should the test go well, it will then be rolled out across STT GDC’s portfolio of data centers globally.
"I think people conflate AI with automation," CEO Jim Gao told DCD for our upcoming cooling supplement. "Our customers do it all the time. They think, ‘Oh, no, the AI is here to take my job, or the AI is here to do what I already do today.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, there are areas where, if something is like a rote routine automation that you don't really want to do anyway, AI can do that.
“But honestly, where AI shines is in creativity. It's in challenging your existing ways of thinking and discovering knowledge that did not exist before."
