What just happened? Intel recently announced a pair of investments intended to create more sustainable data center tech. The Santa Clara chipmaker will spend more than $700 million to build a 200,000-square-foot research and development facility tasked with addressing areas like heat recapture and reuse, immersion cooling and water usage effectiveness.
The lab will also test and qualify Intel data center products under the Xeon and Optane brands as well as Intel Agilex FPGAs and Xe architecture products. Customers and partners will also be able to visit the lab and see Intel products in action in data center environments to determine if they would be a good fit in their own operations.
Construction on the research lab will start later this year at the Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro, Oregon, and is expected to wrap up sometime in late 2023.
Team Blue also introduced the industry's first open intellectual property (open IP) immersion liquid cooling solution and reference design. With the move, Intel hopes to simplify and accelerate the rollout of its immersion liquid cooling solutions globally.
Intel isn't the only major technology company interested in immersion liquid cooling. A little over a year ago, Microsoft announced it was testing a two-phase immersion cooling solution to keep toasty servers from getting too hot.
The initial proof of concept is being developed in partnership with Intel Taiwan and will see a phased rollout locally before expanding to other markets.