Power requirements for data centers have grown from tens to 200 kilowatts in a few years, a pace that has data center developers scrambling to design future facilities that can handle the load.
“In the next few years, it will be 600 kilowatts, and then we will go to a megawatt,” Tim Heidel, CEO of Veir, told TechCrunch. “We’re talking to people who are now trying to wrap their heads around the architecture of how you design data centers that have multi-megawatt racks.”
At those scales, even the low-voltage cables that bring power to the racks begin to take up too much space and generate too much heat.
To rein it in, Veir adapted its superconducting electrical cables to bring them into the data center. The Microsoft-backed startup’s first product will be a cable system that can carry 3 megawatts of low-voltage electricity.
To demonstrate the technology, Veir built a simulated data center near its headquarters in Massachusetts. The cables will be piloted in data centers next year ahead of an expected commercial launch in 2027, Heidel said.
Superconductors are a class of materials that can conduct electricity without energy loss. The only problem is that they need to be cooled well below freezing.
Veir had previously focused on using superconductors to improve the capacity of long-distance transmission lines. But utilities are cautious and tend to be slow to adopt new technology. While there’s still a good chance that utilities will eventually use superconductors for high-demand transmission lines, that transition is a bit further in the future.
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“The speed at which the data center community is moving, evolving, growing, scaling and tackling challenges is far greater than the transmission community,” Heidel said.
Veir has been in talks with data centers for years. Recently, the content of these conversations changed.
“We saw a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, this network connectivity problem is a real thing, and we have to figure out how to fix it.’ But then a handful of potential customers started turning around and saying we actually have really hard problems to solve on our campuses and inside our buildings,” he said.
The startup took the same core technology it had developed for transmission lines and adapted it to the low-voltage needs of data centers. Veir buys the superconductors from the same suppliers, and they are wrapped in a jacket to contain the liquid nitrogen coolant that keeps the material at –196˚ C (–321˚ F). Termination boxes sit at the end of these cables to transition from superconductors to copper cables.
“We’re really a system integrator, building the cooling systems, making the cables, putting the whole system together to deliver a huge amount of power in a small space,” Heidel said.
The result is cables that require 20 times less space than copper while carrying power five times longer, Veir said.
“The AI and data center community is desperate for solutions today and is desperate to stay ahead. There is tremendous competitive pressure to stay ahead,” Heidel said.