A megawatt in a few square meters: Rittal and Bosch unveil module for AI data centers
As the OCP Global Summit opened in San Jose, Rittal showed a compact unit combining racks, liquid cooling and Bosch 800-volt power, and announced 100 million euros for new factory capacity.
Symbolic image · Photo: Christopher Bowns / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped and resized)
German infrastructure supplier Rittal on Monday unveiled an architecture for AI data centers that combines server racks, direct-to-chip liquid cooling and DC power distribution in a single compact unit, as the OCP Global Summit opened in San Jose, California. The company said the design supports more than one megawatt of IT load on a few square meters. The open data center standards conference runs Oct. 12-15.
At its core is a coolant distribution unit with more than one megawatt of water-based cooling capacity. Power comes from a demonstrator using Bosch 800-volt power electronics; Rittal said the modular power concept can scale to two megawatts. "AI data centers need an industrially scalable architecture for the whitespace," Rittal Chief Technology Officer Philipp Guth said, according to a company statement.
Bosch executive Bruno Ahrens called efficient, reliable power electronics at industrial scale a core competence of the company. Rittal also said it will invest 100 million euros to expand its factories in Europe and the United States, as the latest AI chips push power and cooling demands beyond what conventional data center equipment can handle.