The power demands of data centers have grown from ten to 200 kilowatts in just a few years, a pace that has data center developers scrambling to design future facilities that can handle the load.
“In the next couple of years, it’s going to be 600 kilowatts, and then we’re going to one megawatt,” said Tim Heidel, CEO. VirTechCrunch said. “We’re talking to people who are now trying to wrap their heads around the architecture of how you design data centers that have multi-megawatt racks.”
At this scale, even the low-voltage cables that bring power to the rack begin to take up too much space and generate too much heat.
To curb this, Viar adapted its 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, Veer built a simulated data center near its headquarters in Massachusetts. Heidel said the cables will be tested in data centers ahead of an expected commercial launch in 2027.
Superconductors are a class of materials that can conduct electricity with zero loss of energy. The only drawback is that they need to be chilled well below freezing.
Viar previously focused on using superconductors to improve capacity in long-distance transmission lines. But utilities tend to be cautious and slow to adopt new technologies. While there’s still a good chance utilities will eventually tap superconductors for high-demand transmission lines, that transition is a little further in the future.
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“The speed at which the data center community is moving, evolving, growing, scaling and meeting challenges is far greater than the transmission community,” Heidel said.
Viar has been in discussions with data centers for years. Recently, the timing of that conversation has changed.
We were seeing a lot of people saying, ‘Oh this grid interconnection problem is a real thing, and we’ve got to figure out how to solve it.’ But then a handful of potential customers started turning around and saying, we have really hard problems to solve on our campus and inside our buildings,” he said.
The startup took the same core technology it developed for transmission lines and adapted it to the low-voltage needs of data centers. Veir buys superconductors from the same suppliers, and they are wrapped in a jacket to contain liquid nitrogen coolant that keeps the material at -196˚ C (–321˚ F). Termination boxes sit at the end of this cable for conversion from superconductor to copper cable.
We’re really a system integrator that builds the cooling system, prepares the cables, puts the whole system together to deliver a lot of power in a small space,” Heidel said.
The result is cables that require 20 times less space than copper while carrying five times more power, Weir said.
“The AI and data center community today is desperate to find solutions and desperate to stay ahead. There’s a lot of competitive pressure to stay ahead,” Heidel said.