Request for Information (RFI): Increasing Data Center Energy Efficiency

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Request for Information (RFI): Increasing Data Center Energy EfficiencyThis is a Request for Information (RFI) only. This RFI is not soliciting application for financial assistance. The purpose of this RFI is solely to solicit input for ARPA-E consideration to inform the possible formulation of future programs.The purpose of this RFI is to solicit input for a potential future ARPA-E research program focused on novel, potentially transformative technical opportunities, and approaches to increase the energy efficiency of data centers. Online services and online data use have grown exponentially for years and is expected to grow even more so in the upcoming years due to growing trends such as virtual online meetings, artificial intelligence, machine learning, machine vision, and augmented reality. Recent indications also illustrate that we are on the precipice of accelerated machine-to-machine communication also known as Internet of Things (IOT) as cars, aircraft, industrial machines, and household devices will start gathering and communicating data for their operations. These virtual communications occur on an infrastructure supported by millions of servers that are hosted in data centers. Data centers exist in a variety of sizes and operational models ranging from enterprise, co-location to hyperscale data centers. It is projected that current U.S. data centers consume in excess of 75 billion kWh electricity annually3 and that innovative technologies such as advances in semiconductors, virtualization and economization have contributed to a relatively modest increase in energy usage compared to the 550% growth in compute instances over the past decade. However, the semiconductor transistor scaling trend which consistently delivered operational energy savings during this time period, or “Moore’s law”, reached an inflection point in 2016, and it is therefore expected that data center energy usage will rise as future data communications demand is expected to grow exponentially. The goal of the potential program is to support transformational technologies that can increase the energy efficiency of current and future data centers over as wide an application range as possible. Examples of potential areas of interest are disruptive innovations in efficient and reliable power supply, data processing, thermal management, server, rack, or building designs. These technologies could be developed as stand-alone component innovations or be considered as part of system-level approaches that span multiple component innovations as a system.The information you provide may be used by ARPA-E in support of program planning. THIS IS A REQUEST FOR INFORMATION ONLY. THIS NOTICE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A FUNDING OPPORTUNITY ANNOUNCEMENT (FOA). NO FOA EXISTS AT THIS TIME. To view the RFI in its entirety, please visit https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov.

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