(Iowa News Service) – Iowa State University researchers are looking into why data centers use so much power, both now and in the future. To cut down on power use, they made a material that is as thin as an atom.
A national study found that by 2030, data centers will use 9% of the country’s energy to power the internet, AI apps, and other technologies.
Matthew Panthani is an associate professor of chemistry and biological engineering at Iowa State University. He and his team are working on a way to power the new data centers that are popping up nearby that doesn’t use heat.
Panthani said, “Iowa seems to be a popular place to build data centers.” “Meta and other businesses have built data centers, some of them even near Des Moines.” They’re taking advantage of the fact that wind energy usually has pretty low power costs.
Panthani’s lab is working on making atom-thin sheets of a silicon-germanium alloy. These sheets are put on top of each other to make very energy-efficient semiconductors that can be used in data centers that need a lot of power.
It’s not new to send info through light. Fiber optic technology has been used by businesses to send light across seas, for example. On the other hand, Panthani said that doing it on a much smaller scale, like between parts on computer chips in data centers, is very different.
“That’s mostly because there isn’t a material that can make scalable light sources on chips,” Panthani said. “The materials we’re working on are meant to have properties that will make that possible, both in terms of how they can be made and their properties.”
The Electric Power Research Institute says that the 5.3 billion people who use the internet can use as much electricity as 800,000 homes. It will go up a lot this decade, which will make new technologies like this even more important and raise the market even more.