European cloud and data center firm OVHcloud has announced a new cooling architecture for its data centers.

The company said the OVHcloud Smart Datacenter combines new industrial designs with AI features, reducing both power and water consumption, adding that the new approach can reduce water consumption by up to 30 percent and cooling electricity consumption by up to 50 percent.

“We are delighted to unveil a new generation of evaporative cooling solutions, including Smart Racks. With our one integrated cooling loop design, we are paving the way for Smart Datacenters that leverage our most advanced technologies as well as artificial intelligence to tackle what was once an impossible equation,” said Miroslaw Klaba, OVHcloud R&D director.

In development for the past two years, the fifth generation of the OVHcloud server rack has been redesigned with a new server layout where clusters of servers are connected in serial when it comes to their cooling, with servers for each cluster still organized in parallel for maintenance.

Hardware components, such as CPUs and GPUs, are cooled through direct-to-chip waterblocks designed by OVHcloud, dissipating heat through a closed-loop water circuit that extends to a single cooling loop across the whole data center.

The new cooling distribution units (CDUs) are 50 percent smaller than previous generations and located outside the rack. It can cool down several rows of racks and features more than 30 sensors that monitor elements from the racks, including pressure, speed, and water temperature, and can adjust cooling settings in real time. The sensors allow the system to automatically adjust to server workloads.

The Smart Dry Cooler, located on the outside, now takes up half the space and has half the number of fans as the previous generation of equipment, reducing cooling power consumption by up to 50 percent.

New OVHcloud Smart Racks are currently being deployed at the Roubaix data center in France, in a room filled with nearly 60 racks and 2,000 servers alongside the new cooling system. The entire system is expected to be rolled out across the group's data centers.

OVH has more than 40 core data centers in operation and under construction in France, Canada, the US, Australia, Germany, Poland, Singapore, India, Italy, and the UK. These are a mix of self-built and leased locations. The company also has local zone Edge locations in some 28 metros globally.