Data center power requirements have grown from tens to 200 kilowatts in just a few years, a rate that has data center developers scrambling to design future facilities that can handle the load.
“In the next two years, it will be 600 kilowatts, and then we’ll go to a megawatt,” said Tim Heidel, CEO of Veerhe 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 a multi-megawatt rack.”
At these 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 test this, Veir adapted superconducting electrical cables to bring them inside the data center. The Microsoft-backed startup’s first product will be a cable system capable of carrying 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 before an expected commercial launch in 2027, Heidel said.
Superconductors are a class of materials that can conduct electricity with zero energy loss. The only problem is that they have to be cooled well below freezing temperatures.
Veir has previously focused on using superconductors to improve capacity in 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 rate at which the data center community moves, evolves, grows, scales and challenges is much faster than the broadcast community,” Heidel said.
Veir has been in talks with data centers for years. Recently, the content of these conversations has changed.
“We saw a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, this network interconnect problem is a real thing, and we have to figure out how to solve it.’ But then a handful of potential customers started turning around and saying, we have really, really hard problems to solve on our campuses and inside our buildings,” he said.
The startup used 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 are located at the end of these cables to transition from the superconductors to the copper cables.
“We’re really a systems integrator that builds the cooling systems, builds the cables, puts 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 farther, Veir said.
“The AI and data center community is desperate for solutions today and desperate to stay ahead. There is tremendous competitive pressure to stay at the forefront,” said Heidel.
