Data centres typically consume huge amounts of energy – a significant proportion of which is used to cool the facilities due to the enormous amount of waste heat that is generated during computation.
To help alleviate the issue, big tech giants have installed data farms in the Arctic Circle in order to utilise the ambient cold temperatures to reduce the amount of energy needed to cool the equipment.
But the ramping popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR) and the Internet of Things (IoT), is requiring volumes of data to be processed rapidly with as minimal delay as possible on the user end.
To achieve this, the processing of the data must move closer to the place where it was created such as for micro data centres in local neighbourhoods. The team hopes that the waste heat from these local data centres will eventually be used to heat nearby buildings as a way to improve energy efficiency.
The project, called ECO-Qube, is applying...