Las Vegas – June 18, 2024 – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) and Danfoss today announced a collaboration to deliver HPE IT Sustainability Services – Data Center Heat Recovery, an off-the shelf heat recovery module, helping organizations manage and value excess1 heat as they transition towards more sustainable IT facilities.
The rapid integration of AI technologies across organizations and businesses is expected to have a dramatic increase in the power demand and utilization of AI optimized IT infrastructure. According to the International Energy Agency, by 2026 the AI industry is expected to have grown exponentially to consume at least ten times its electricity demand in 20232. To mitigate these challenges, IT leaders and data center facility operators are taking action to reduce energy usage, such as implementing modern power-efficient capabilities and improved cooling systems. Excess heat in the EU alone represents an estimated 2,860 TWh/y, almost equals to the EU’s total energy demand for heat and hot water in residential and service sector buildings3. The flow of excess heat from data centers is uninterruptible and therefore constitutes a very reliable source of clean energy.
To address these issues, the offering from HPE and Danfoss offers:
- HPE’s scalable Modular Data Center (MDC), in the form of small footprint, high-density (kW/rack) containers, can be deployed nearly anywhere in the total absence of heavy industry and incorporates technologies such as direct liquid cooling, reducing overall energy consumption by 20%.
- Danfoss’ heat reuse modules that capture excess heat from data centers to provide renewable heating onsite and to neighboring buildings and industries for various applications, and Turbocor® oil-free compressors that enhance data center cooling efficiency by up to 30%.
With unparalleled density, HPE’s modular data centers offer an impressive power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.14 in contrast to the PUE of 1.3 to 1.4 typically associated with the best modern designs of traditional brick-and-mortar data centers. Capable of handling the most power-demanding architectures like HPE Cray Supercomputing EX4000, HPE’s modular data center is the adequate architecture for mission critical and compute intensive workloads like supercomputing and generative AI, enabling scientists, universities, and enterprises to achieve faster outcomes.
To leverage excess heat – one of the largest untapped sources of energy and the largest potential for data centers across Europe, HPE has partnered up with Danfoss as their decarbonization partner. The strategic partnership takes advantage of Danfoss’ extensive product portfolio of energy-efficient solutions to drive innovation, support decarbonization and build the blueprint for the next generation of sustainable modular data centers.
HPE IT Sustainability Services – Data Center Heat Recovery is inspired by how Danfoss is already using heat reuse technology at its own headquarters campus in Denmark. Here, the heat is recovered from Danfoss’ onsite data center, boosted by a heat pump, and re-used in surrounding buildings to provide space heating. The heat can also be fed into the local district heating network to provide a renewable heat source to local residents. Reusing heat is a major part of Danfoss’ own decarbonization strategy which has helped Danfoss achieve carbon neutrality in the energy system of its 250,000m2 campus in Nordborg in 2022.
The new scalable modular data center offering leverages Danfoss technologies, including Turbocor® compressors for heat pumps and chillers, heat exchangers, heat reuse modules, drives and pump skids allowing data centers to be cooled up to 30% more efficiently while recovering and reusing excess heat. It’s a modular solution with components that work together seamlessly and includes two technology stack options with a heat recovery system, including hydronic heat recovery heat exchanger and water-water heat pump, recovering heat from an air-cooled edge-to-cloud modular data center today and potentially second phase liquid cooled HPC modular data center.
As part of its holistic “Reduce, Reuse, Resource” approach, Danfoss also partners with HPE to retire its end-of-use IT assets through HPE Asset Upcycling Services, a circular economy solution that enables technology refurbishment and reuse, while recovering economic value from those assets.
HPE IT Sustainability Services – Data Center Heat Recovery is available to order immediately.
Additional Resources
- HPE and Danfoss unveil Heat Recovery Solution for Enterprise Environmental Goals by Pascal Lecoq, Worldwide Director, Sustainable Data Center Modernization at HPE
- UK Government invests £225m to create UK’s most powerful AI supercomputer with University of Bristol and Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise builds AI supercomputer for CRIANN to accelerate scientific research and innovation
- Danfoss solutions for datacenters
- Danfoss paper on decarbonization of data center industry