Intel will invest $700 million in a lab in Oregon focused on researching heating, cooling and water usage in data centers as part of its greenhouse gas reduction goals.
Work on the 200,000 square foot facility at the Jones Farm campus will begin this year and finish in late 2023, Intel said Thursday. In addition to research, the lab will be used to test and qualify Xeon and Optane data center products, Habana accelerators and more. It was also serve as a showcase for customers to observe and test products.
Intel also introduced an open intellectual property immersion liquid cooling system and reference design, with the initial design set for Taiwan. The IP will let partners introduce Intel immersion liquid cooling systems to deal with increases in data center power uses.
Data centers are big electricity hogs and make up 1% of the world’s electricity demand, while also pumping out 0.3% of global carbon emissions. Immersion cooling with energy reuse could reduce carbon emissions by 45%, Intel said.
In April, Intel announced plans for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040,
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In a separate sustainability announcement on Thursday, H2GO Power announced deployment of a hydrogen storage system for the electric grid in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The company said its technology could remove 225,000 gallons of diesel over its 30 year lifetime.
Funding was secured from the UK Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy. H2GO’s system is autonomous and is integrated with AI to store and dispense hydrogen in solid state materials.