Nvidia Smart Data Center Patent Could Give Chip Giant ‘Design Control’

Nvidia wants to control data centers from the ground up. 

The chip giant filed a patent application for an “intelligent data center.” This tech would essentially control data centers’ power resources down to the server racks, allowing them to intricately adapt to fluctuating power demands. 

“Today’s data centers are not designed to efficiently handle the ever increasing and continually changing power demand,” Nvidia said in the filing. 

Typically, data centers are designed to handle the maximum possible demand, leading to higher than necessary energy spend. Nvidia’s patent proposes a system that, rather than equally distributing power and cooling resources among all of a data center’s server racks, would shift power between server racks as necessary – without needing to make significant physical changes. 

Nvidia’s tech would do this by calculating the average power demand for each cluster of server racks, and shifting more or less power and cooling in between them in relation to other surrounding server racks. For example, if one cluster of server racks is experiencing above-average power demand while two others are sitting idle, rather than allotting them equal power, some resources may be transferred to the servers that are working overtime. 

While over-engineered and rigid data centers are “not only expensive to manufacture, but in the general use case, are incredibly inefficient and expensive to operate,” this tech overcomes that by providing a level of flexibility and “degrees of freedom,” said Nvidia. 

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Nvidia seek to fix data centers’ energy problems. It’s previously sought to patent a way to power down “idle cores” within these server farms, as well as a “health monitoring” system for data centers. 

And it makes sense why Nvidia is researching this technology: Its chips are the mitochondria of the data center. With the rising demand of generative AI, the company’s data center revenue has been eye-popping in recent quarters: It reached $22.6 billion in quarterly earnings, reported in May, and $18.4 billion in the quarter prior, up more than 400% year-over-year for both periods.

But with its next earnings report coming at the end of August, some fear that the AI boom is nearing a bust — and Nvidia may feel the impact. However, a concept in this patent may actually help Nvidia maintain its winning streak: “design control,” said Trevor Morgan, senior vice president of operations at OpenDrives. 

This patent highlights what Morgan called the “Nvidia way” of running a data center, aiming to demonstrate thought leadership, especially amid mounting worries over the energy costs of data centers. 

“They’re creating a framework for the smart data center,” said Morgan. “They’re getting out in front of this and saying, ‘This is what the design should look like.’” 

However, because Nvidia’s chips are so ubiquitous, controlling the way that data centers are designed would only serve to grow the tech giant’s influence, said Morgan. “It’s a small investment for them to test out the limits of where they can go with their business’s influence. That’s why I thought this was really powerful and really multifaceted.”