Akash Systems, supported by international investors Vinod Khosla and Peter Thiel, said that it had signed a $27 million (about Rs 225 crore) deal on Wednesday with NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies, the biggest sovereign cloud provider in India, to distribute its “diamond-cooled” AI servers around India.
“The collaboration will position NxtGen as the world’s most energy-efficient AI compute solutions provider by using Nvidia and AMD GPUs (graphic processing units) that are ‘diamond cooled’ by Akash. The new servers will support NxtGen’s mission to provide energy-efficient and cost-effective AI compute services to enterprises of all sizes across India,” both the companies said in a joint statement.
“We are collaborating with Akash to set an industry benchmark for sustainable AI. Through a combination of Akash’s diamond cooling, waterless liquid cooling, and advanced GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD, we are able to double the performance per watt,” said AS Rajgopal, CEO & MD of NxtGen.
This enables us to deliver very high-value AI use cases to our customers while also lowering the cost of AI compute services by more than 50% compared to current market rates, he added.
NxtGen, with its headquarters in Bengaluru, runs several data centers and provides a variety of services, such as managed security, disaster recovery, and AI computing. Due to the rising demand for data center services, the company is currently extending its infrastructure.
A new cooling method for the semiconductor industry called “diamond cooling” works with current thermal management systems. According to the assertion, synthetic diamond is the most thermally conductive substance in the world.
A diamond’s thermal conductivity is five times higher than that of copper, the next greatest material, with 2200 W/mK (watts per meter-Kelvin).
“Our diamond-cooled GPU servers will empower NxtGen to deliver unparalleled performance and reliability to their customers, reinforcing their position as a leader in AI and other compute solutions,” said Felix Ejeckam, CEO and co-founder of Akash Systems.
“This partnership with NxtGen highlights the scalability of Akash’s technology and also showcases its ability to accelerate AI workloads by reducing thermal throttling and maximizing over-compute cycles. In short, the Diamond Cooled servers are the way to go,” says Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures.
The US-based company Akash Systems specializes in the creation and production of semiconductors and systems based on diamond. Kearny Jackson and Founders Fund are among its other investors in addition to Khosla Ventures.
The servers from Akash Systems, designed to manage demanding AI workloads such as machine learning and deep learning applications, invented diamond cooling for satellites in space, an atmosphere devoid of air.
Even for AMD and Nvidia servers that use liquid cooling, diamond-cooled servers lower the GPU hotspot temperature by 10° to 20°C. According to the statement, this leads to a remarkable 90% reduction in GPU fan energy usage and a 50% decrease in GPU fan speed.
The collaboration with NxtGen comes after the US Department of Commerce last month approved Akash Systems for up to $68 million in funding under the CHIPS and Science Act.
A new semiconductor to hit the market in more than two decades, Gallium Nitride-on-Diamond technology, was invented by Akash Systems, which was founded in 2016 by Felix Ejeckam and Ty Mitchell.
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