Tag: datum center

This L.A. startup uses SpaceX tech to cool data centers with less power and no water

[ad_1]

As the artificial intelligence industry heats up, Karman Industries is trying to cool it down.

The Signal Hill startup says it has developed a cooling system that uses SpaceX rocket engine technology to rein in the environmental impact of data centers, chilling them with less space, less power and no water.

It recently raised $20 million and expects to start building its first compressors in Long Beach later this year.

“Our high-level thesis is we could build the best compressor out there using the latest and greatest technology,” said David Tearse, chief executive of Karman. “We want to reduce that electrical consumption of cooling so that you have the most efficient way to cool these chips.”

The high-end, expensive chips that power AI can slow down or shut off when they overheat. They can reach more than 200 degrees, but need to be below 150 degrees to work best.

Cooling warehouses packed with tens of thousands of them can require fields full of equipment and huge quantities of water.

Karman has developed a cooling system similar to the heat pumps in the average home, except its pumps use liquid carbon dioxide as refrigerant, which is circulated using rocket engine technology rather than fans. The company’s efficient pumps can reduce the space required for data center cooling equipment by 80%.

Over the years, data centers have used fans and air conditioning to blow cold air on the chips. Bigger facilities pass cold liquid through tubes near the chips to absorb the heat. This hot liquid is sent outside to a cooling yard, where sprawling networks of pipes use as much water as a city of 50,000 people to remove the heat.

A 50 megawatt data center also uses enough electricity to power a mid-sized city.

As AI has super-sized data centers, adding more and more chips, they have needed increasing amounts of space and power for cooling.

“It’s kind of a losing battle, especially when you keep densifying your chips,” said Tearse.

Cooling systems account for up to 40% of a data center’s power consumption and an average midsized data center consumes more than 35,000 gallons of water per day.

Nearly 100 gigawatts of new data center capacity will be added by 2030 and energy constraints have become the biggest barrier for expansion. U.S. data centers will consume about 8% of all electricity in the country by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

Communities across the U.S. have begun protesting data center construction, fearing that the power and water needs could strain infrastructure and boost costs to consumers. The cooling systems are projected to use up to 33 billion gallons of water by 2028 per year.

Big tech companies and venture capital investors are spending billions of dollars to replace old-school technologies with energy-efficient solutions. Microsoft announced a new data center design that uses zero water for cooling. It recently vowed to ensure its data centers don’t increase the electricity costs or deny water to nearby communities.

The data center-cooling market is projected to grow from about $11 billion in 2025 to nearly $25 billion by 2032.

To serve this seemingly insatiable market, Karman has developed a rotating compressor that spins at 30,000 revolutions per minute — nearly 10 times faster than traditional compressors — to move heat.

“Three or four years ago, it was very challenging to do just because the motors didn’t exist. Automotive components are getting up to those speeds,” said Chiranjeev Kalra, co-founder and chief technology officer of Karman.

About a third of Karman’s 23-person team came from SpaceX or Rocket Lab, and they co-opted technologies from aerospace engineering and electric vehicles to design the mechanics for the high-speed motors.

The system uses a special type of carbon dioxide under high pressure to transfer heat from the data center to the outside air. Depending on the conditions, it can do the same amount of cooling using less than half the energy.

Karman’s heat pump can either reject heat to air, or route it into extra cooling, or even power generation.

One of the potentially biggest selling points for the systems is that they don’t require water, which will enable data centers in spots where water is scarce.

In really hot places such as Texas and Arizona, cooling systems struggle, either using excessive water to cool or having to throttle the chips to stop them from overheating.

Karman’s latest funding round brings the total money raised to more than $30 million. Major participants included Riot Venture, Sunflower Capital, Space VC, Wonder Ventures, and former Intel and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

Karman said it will begin customer deliveries in the summer of 2026 from its Los Angeles manufacturing facility that is designed to make 100 units per year. The plan is to eventually quadruple capacity.

If successful, Karman could dent the market share of Trane Technologies and Schneider Electric, the leaders in heat rejection systems.

[ad_2]

Nilesh Christopher

Source link

January 22, 2026
Promises of lower energy bills win big on election day

[ad_1]

Key races in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia made it clear that energy affordability was on the ballot this election day as Democrats who campaigned on the issue swept the field.

Candidates in the three states campaigned on tackling rising energy costs through renewables, such as wind and solar, or by supporting the Trump administration in promoting fossil fuels, such as oil, gas and coal.

Trump has said that ramping up the production of fossil fuels will “unleash American energy” and save taxpayers money. But residential electric bills have increased about 10% nationwide this year — from 15.9 cents per kilowatt hour in January to 17.6 cents at the end of August, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

At the same time, wind and solar remain the least expensive form of new-build electricity generation, according to the financial advisory firm Lazard.

The race for New Jersey governor saw Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill face off against Republican Jack Ciattarelli after state residents saw a roughly 20% price spike in electricity rates this year driven by reduced supply and growing demand from data centers and a slow rollout of renewables, among other challenges.

Sherrill campaigned heavily on the issue, vowing to declare a state of emergency on utility costs on her first day in office and institute a utility rate freeze.

“Prices are spiking because of a huge power shortage — I’ll transform New Jersey’s energy picture to build new, cheaper, and cleaner energy generation, bring down families’ bills, and put the Garden State on track to hit our emissions and clean air goals,” Sherrill wrote in her campaign materials.

Ciattarelli, meanwhile, vowed to implement a state energy master plan fueled by natural gas, nuclear and solar power but not offshore wind, which he promised to ban. “I will cap property taxes for families and freeze them for seniors, while killing offshore wind farms and expanding safe and clean natural gas and nuclear to lower electricity rates, which are currently out of control,” he told the NJ Spotlight News.

Ciattarelli also called for pulling the state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a market-based program to reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in Mid-Atlantic states that is similar to California’s cap-and-trade program.

Sherrill won the governor’s race with more than 56% of the vote.

Energy prices are spiking in the U.S., in part, because the Trump administration has been cutting funding for wind, solar and battery energy storage, according to Nick Abraham, senior state communications director with the nonprofit League of Conservation Voters. The administration also has moved to block some projects that were almost completed.

“These races were about energy costs and affordability, and there were two clear cases made by candidates on both sides,” Abraham said. “One side wanted to stick with the Trump agenda — trying to ban clean energy and focusing on fossil fuels — and one side was trying to lower costs and implement clean energy strategies. And the results speak for themselves.”

According to Lazard, the cost of utility-scale solar ranges from $38 to $78 per megawatt hour and offshore wind from $37 to $86 per megawatt hour.

That’s compared with $71 to $173 per megawatt hour for coal and $149 to $251 per megawatt hour for gas peaking plants, among fossil fuels.

The issue was also top-of-mind with voters in Virginia, who took to the polls in a governor’s race between Democrat Abigail Spanberger and Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. The state is now home to more than a third of all data centers worldwide.

Spanberger focused heavily on affordability in housing, healthcare and energy during her campaign and said she would expand and incentivize the development of solar energy projects, along with technologies such as fusion, geothermal and hydrogen.

“Specific to energy, we have to have more generation here on the ground in Virginia,” Spanberger said in an interview with CBS in Richmond, adding that the state is already leading the way with the largest offshore wind farm in the country. The 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is slated to produce enough clean energy to power up to 660,000 homes when completed in 2026.

Earle-Sears focused on an “all of the above” approach to energy generation including oil, natural gas and renewables, but also worked to remove the state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which she described as an “energy tax” driving higher costs. She also promised to repeal the Virginia Clean Economy Act, a 2020 law that requires the state’s utilities to produce 100% renewable electricity by 2050.

Spanberger won the governor’s race with more than 57% of the vote.

Meanwhile, voters in Georgia also turned out in a race for two seats on their five-member Public Service Commission, which oversees the state’s utilities. The commission approved six utility bill rate hikes over the last two years.

Democratic challengers Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson won out over Republicans in Tuesday’s race with the largest statewide margins of victory by Democrats in more than 20 years, according to the Associated Press.

Both candidates made rising costs key in their campaigns, with Hubbard vowing to “bring clean, reliable and affordable energy to Georgia” and Johnson pushing for “bold investments in solar and wind.”

Their opponents, Republicans Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson, backed a rate freeze but also resorted to Trump-style attacks, with Echols stating at a campaign event that Johnson, a Black woman, wanted to “bring DEI and wokeness” to the Public Service Commission.

Policy experts said the races were not only a bellwether for the 2026 midterms, but a strong signal that Americans support the clean energy transition.

“Voters chose leaders who see clean energy as the path to long-term affordability and reliability,” said Frederick Bell, associate director for state climate policy at the Center for American Progress, a think tank.

[ad_2]

Hayley Smith

Source link

November 5, 2025
Southern California’s hottest commercial real estate market is for tenants that aren’t human

[ad_1]

Where Wilshire Boulevard begins in downtown Los Angeles, thousands of miles of undersea fiber-optic cables disappear into an ordinary-looking office tower.

One Wilshire is the mother of all data centers in the West, a discreet terminus for major digital links between Asia and North America that help sustain the world’s bottomless need for data storage and computing power.

Once a workplace for lawyers and other white-collar types, the mid-century office building‘s 30 floors are now stuffed with cables, pipes, coolers, generators and other equipment needed to support online functions that power the economy and our private lives at unmatched speed. (If you could get inside — and you can’t — the building’s internet connection would give you a split-second jump over others when tickets for the World Series or a concert went on sale.)

“We’re all consumers of data centers,” whether its scrolling social media on our smartphones, watching streaming services such as Netflix on TV or ordering a dog food delivery on our our laptops, said Maile Kaiser, chief revenue officer of data center operator CoreSite, the largest tenant in One Wilshire. “Any content that we make is stored in a data center.”

City Hall is framed by windows at an office space that has been stripped and is available to be used as a data center at One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The digital transformation of One Wilshire, which is nearing completion with the recent departure of one of the last conventional tenants, is part of a larger real estate boom underway across Los Angeles County.

As artificial intelligence and cloud storage hoover up more and more space on the nation’s computer servers, real estate developers are racing to build new data centers or convert existing buildings to data uses. The need is so great, they’re having a hard time keeping up with demand as businesses in search of secure spots for their servers rent nearly every square foot that becomes available. Large-scale backup generators to keep the 24-7 operations running in the event of a power failure are in short supply.

Construction of new data centers is at “extraordinary levels” driven by “insatiable demand,” a recent report on the industry by real estate brokerage JLL found.

Electrician Oscar Rivas works on a new generator system on the third floor of One Wilshire, a high-rise office building that has been almost entirely converted into a data center in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“Never in my career of 25 years in real estate have I seen demand like this on a global scale,” said JLL real estate broker Darren Eades, who specializes in data centers.

The biggest drivers are AI and cloud service providers that include some of the biggest names in tech, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.

With occupancy in conventional office buildings still down sharply following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and property values falling, data centers represent a rare ripe opportunity for real estate developers, who are pursuing opportunities in major markets like Los Angeles and less urban locales that are served by plentiful and preferably cheap power needed to run data centers.

“If you can find a cluster of power to build a site, they’ll come,” Eades said of developers.

Construction is taking place at an “extraordinary” pace nationwide and still not keeping up, the JLL data center report said. “Vacancy declined to a record low of 3% at midyear due to insatiable demand and despite rampant construction.”

Development increased more than sevenfold in two years, with the pipeline of new projects leveling off in the first half of 2024, a potential signal that the U.S. power grid cannot support development at a faster pace.

Satellites and antennas are perched on the rooftop at One Wilshire.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

But when projects currently under construction or planned are complete, the U.S. colocation market, in which businesses rent space in a data center owned by another company for their servers and other computing hardware, will triple in size from current levels.

With the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence-driven products and platforms became ubiquitous seemingly overnight, JLL said. The huge amount of computing power required by generative AI is having the greatest impact on data storage, followed by continued cloud growth.

Real estate investors and landlords are being drawn into the market because demand from tenants is high and they are likely to renew their leases after shouldering the costs of setting up data centers.

“They invest in their space and in your space and they tend to stick around longer,” said Mark Messana, president of Downtown Properties, which owns offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. “As we all know, the office market is struggling a little bit, so it’s nice to be able to have some data customers in the mix.”

Rents at One Wilshire, for example, can be double what they are at newer downtown office high-rises, according to real estate data provider CoStar.

Servers, power lines and cooling equipment have almost completely taken over the building that was once a prestigious address for businesses. There are electric conduits running up stairwells and racks of cables hanging from ceilings. Two elevators were removed so the empty shafts could hold water pipes used to help keep the temperature cool enough for the heat-producing servers.

Crypto.com Arena is seen from the rooftop of One Wilshire.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The recent departure of a law firm that had been in the building more than 50 years cleared out five floors that will quickly be re-leased to data tenants, said Eades, who represents the landlord.

Challenges in the rapidly expanding data center industry include finding trained workers to staff facilities around the clock, seven days a week.

“These are high-paying, high-demand jobs,” Eades said, with employers scooping up computer science and engineering majors out of college.

The job can take a toll on workers, though. There are long hours in enclosed buildings with limited contact with the outside world, and working night shifts “can be challenging for employees to endure,” the report said. Thirty percent of data center workers quit in the last year, citing unhappiness with their work/life balance, the JLL report said.

Filling second- and third-shift jobs can add an additional month or more to the hiring process because of applicants’ reluctance to work off hours, even when they pay more than day jobs, according to the report.

Southern California suffers from a shortage of new data centers, as new users enter the market daily and demand continues to grow, JLL said. That’s spurring development in smaller markets in Los Angeles County such as Vernon, which has its own power plant that provides electricity at cheaper rates than are found in surrounding cities.

Monterey Park, which is served by Southern California Edison, is also “a hot area,” Eades said, where two new developments will be announced in the next month or so.

Power demand for computing is growing so intense that it threatens to strain the nation’s electrical grid, sending users to remote locations where power is plentiful and preferably cheap.

Data center developers are working in Alabama, the Dakotas and Indiana, “traditionally states that wouldn’t have data centers,” Eades said.

A company called CalEthos plans a data center near the south shore of the Salton Sea in California’s Imperial County. Electricity for the data center’s servers would come from the geothermal and solar plants built near the site in an area that has become known as Lithium Valley. That data center would cover land the size of 15 football fields and require power that could support 425,000 homes.

Data centers have long been big power users. But the specialized computer chips required for generative AI use far more electricity because they are designed to read through vast amounts of data.

The new chips also generate so much heat that even more power and water are needed to keep them cool.

By 2030, data centers could account for as much as 11% of U.S. power demand — up from 3% now, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs. Last week a deal was announced to reopen the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in order to power Microsoft’s data centers performing cloud computing and artificial intelligence programs.

The plant, the site of he nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident in 1979, was closed five years ago because it was losing money. Microsoft has agreed to buy power from the plant for 20 years if regulators approve its revival.

“There will always be a need for a data center,” Kaiser said. “Everybody loves to create their content now, whether it’s a photo or a video or online shopping, we’re all doing it. Now we’ll see what we do with AI.”

Times staff writer Melody Petersen contributed to this report.

[ad_2]

Roger Vincent

Source link

September 27, 2024