Amazon is engineering around one of the biggest physical bottlenecks in artificial intelligence, designing new custom cooling hardware to keep next-generation chips from melting down.
In a new post on X, CEO and president Andy Jassy says Amazon has invented a custom In-Row Heat Exchanger (IRHX) system, a sealed liquid-loop design that pipes coolant directly to silicon, after determining off-the-shelf approaches could not scale.
“Either we could wait to build specialized liquid-cooled facilities or adopt off-the-shelf solutions that didn’t scale or meet our unique needs. Neither worked for our customers, so we did what we often do at Amazon… we invented our own solution.”
Jassy says Amazon already operates machine learning (ML) infrastructure at a multi-gigawatt scale and expects liquid-cooled capacity to exceed one-fifth of that footprint by next year as AI workloads intensify.
“By 2026, our liquid-cooled capacity will grow to over 20% of our ML capacity, which is at multi-gigawatt scale today.”
Jassy highlights water savings, power efficiency gains and rapid deployability as core design priorities for the system, which Amazon says can roll out to any of its facilities globally within months.
“Our IRHX can support a wide range of racks requiring liquid cooling, uses 9% less water than fully air-cooled sites, and offers a 20% improvement in power efficiency compared to off-the-shelf solutions. And because we invented it in-house, we can deploy it within months in any of our data centers, creating a flexible foundation to serve our customers for decades to come.”
Replying to Jassy’s post, Tesla CEO Elon Musk says Amazon’s IRHX system is “interesting.”
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