Hey! Coincidentially at Submer we help data centers (rack servers, cloud, HPC, colos, miners, supercomputers…) become more sustainable, efficient and scalable thanks to our sustainable active immersion cooling technology.
Apart from the ‘Submerge’ meaning, Submer is also the acronym of our company values, the first being ‘Sustainable’. We are also backed by impact investors like Norrsken VC and PlanetFirst.
Yes! A very long and tough journey but extremely exciting times... In 2015 we founded Submer (https://submer.com) with my brother-in-law (I know... we knew each other very well and for more than a decade) to try to solve the biggest problems in the data center industry with a highly-efficient liquid immersion cooling technology. These problems are now in an inflection point where all are converging. Among others:
- Chip thermal design power densities keep increasing in such a way that some chips are already impossible to cool unless using liquid and this is being highly accelerated by the end of Moore Law and the usage of more GPUs, ASICs and FPGAs for generative AI, graphics, crypto, HPC...
- Sustainability challenges. An average cloud data center using the typical evaporative air-cooling technologies consume about the amount of water in an Olympic swimming pool every two days and the overall DC industry and IT is estimated to consume more energy than the global air transport. 98% of the energy consumed by DCs is just rejected as heat into the atmosphere.
- The total cost of ownership of datacenters is being affected by the physical limitation of the chip densities increase and its cooling costs, the regulations and energy prices derived from the sustainability, the expensive buildings needed and its speed of construction and other challenges (supply chain, Ukraine war...)
I still remember the excitement of pitching to YC Fellowship batch back in 2015. We were able to get into the final ~100 interviews among 6,500 applicants, but unfortunately we weren't selected. It was still a great experience and motivation and the good news is we are now selling and manufacturing hundreds of MWs of our technology, serving customers worldwide and employing 100+ "Submerians".
Even without being a formal YC Alumni, I feel very grateful for the YC and Hacker News community for the inspiration it brings and very happy to see all these exciting hardware startups! Keep up with the good work!
Yes, you are right. And manufacturers are packing more and more wattage in the same space over time.
Thanks for mentioning immersion cooling as a potential solution to this; as a shameless plug, we are working very hard to make immersion cooling not exotic anymore at Submer ( https://submer.com ), solving all the problems we saw of the previous state of the art and helping with some of the biggest problems in the data center industry: cooling, power, densities, real estate costs, data center location, DC power distribution, TCO and more.
Exciting times... we are seeing a lot of trends pointing towards our immersion cooling solution and stealth traction from big names.
Data centers and cloud providers consume ~6% of the global electricity (more than India) and generate ~4% of the global CO2 emissions (more than 2 times commercial air travel). At Submer we believe our digital world can be more efficient, eco-friendly, safe and cost effective. We develop a highly efficient, eco-friendly, immersion cooling solution to build next generation data centers.
We are a fast-growing startup with very exciting worldwide renown customers based on the sunny Barcelona. We are hiring several senior engineering positions to help capturing the traction we have with supercomputers and hyper-scale cloud providers. Check the job descriptions here: https://submer.com/jobs
Join the eclectic team from all sorts of engineering and business backgrounds with a passion for innovation and environment. This is a great opportunity to join our dynamic team to disrupt how the internet infrastructure works while helping the environment.
Hi HN! Datacenters and cloud providers consume 6% of the global electricity (more than India) and generate 4% of the global CO2 emissions (more than 2 times commercial air travel). After 2 years of hard work, we've been able to finally introduce the first Open Compute and hyper-scale compatible Computing Liquid Immersion Cooling solution this morning in the Open Compute Global Summit in San Jose, CA.
With this technology we have a ~1.03 Power Usage Effectiveness even in extreme and hot climates, we can achieve densities of more than 100kW per rack footprint, enlarge the lifespan of the IT hardware and more. You can check out the technical specs on https://submer.com/smartpodx
Submer NextGen Datacenters | Barcelona & US | HPC / datacenter Specialist Engineer, Senior Sales, Datacenter Mr Wolf | Full-time | ONSITE (HPC Specialist, Barcelona), REMOTE (Sales, US) | https://www.submer.com
Data centers and cloud providers consume ~6% of the global electricity (more than India) and generate ~4% of the global CO2 emissions (more than 2 times commercial air travel). At Submer we develop a highly efficient, eco-friendly, immersion cooling solution to build next generation data centers.
We are a fast-growing startup with very exciting worldwide renown customers. We are hiring an HPC expert to onboard customers and help capturing the traction we have with supercomputers and hyper-scale cloud providers (Barcelona, FULL-TIME, ONSITE).
Also hiring a senior US sales for leading the US growth and customer relationship in the Americas (US, FULL-TIME, REMOTE with willingness to travel) and what we call a Datacenter Mr Wolf; a datacenter expert technician to travel to client sites and keep them engaged, solve any problems they may encounter and train their technical teams / sys admins (REMOTE with willigness to travel worldwide).
Join the eclectic team from all sorts of engineering and business backgrounds with a passion for innovation and environment. This is a great opportunity to join our dynamic team to disrupt how the internet infrastructure works while helping the environment.
Not sure if it will give you useful ideas, but we've seen a clear trend from our customers in increasing requests regarding high density colocation and hosting for AI, deep learning and blockchain/crypto mining hardware (e.g. Nvidia Tesla, ASIC miners like Antminer S9, GPU-based computation).
We have been following this since Microsoft launched project Natick in 2015[1]. Comupting has a large effect on our planet, data centers consume over 6% of the world's electricity (more than India) and generate over 4% of the world's CO2 emmissions (twice that of commercial air-travel)[2]. The approach taken by Microsoft is a nice PR-stunt but we think it's impractical/difficult to carry out maintenance and leads to a very expensive TCO.
FWIW we believe immersion cooling is the most practical approach to reduce energy needs of hungry data centers and still allow them to be situated where they are needed and enable the re-usage of heat. As a shameless plug, I am the co-founder of https://submer.com .
Hi Polvs, I believe we met in Berlin. I hadn't seen immersion cooling before then but was absolutely impressed. Unfortunately setup costs are quite restrictive, but for large scale organisations it does make sense.
Hi Tom, I think I remember you from the C3 Crypto Conference where we had a booth. I know what you mean, the initial cost of acquiring this technology compared to regular air cooling technologies is more expensive in the very short term, but when you consider the operational costs of electricity, the ROI can be under a year.
It becomes much more interesting when you also factor in that you can pack >4x computing power into the same physical space saving a lot of real estate and don't need the huge CAPEX in expensive prepared server rooms nor plan ahead the “hot-spots”.
Why hasn't this taken up pace though? I am pretty sure I read about immersive cooling at least 4 -5 years ago. And 3M had some new "liquid" shown 1 - 2 years ago. Given the scale of which now Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple operate, surely they should be the first one to adopt?
Edit:
Looks like I asked the question a while ago. From Anandtech and Servethehome:
10 years ago, liquid had a thermal limit. Now it is around 5x that old limit. Problem is cost ($$$/gallon of the liquid) and installation. Has to be marketed on TCO. Also, issues with submerged fiber connections
2U air cooling can reliably handle 8x 200w+ TDP CPUs, 600w of NVMe, plus RAM and add-in cards. 4U designs can handle 6kW of cooling on air. Liquid may be more efficient, and more data centers are being built for it, but air is easy to deploy.
I'd love to discuss your research. We've been working low-profile during the last years doing a lot of R&D and experimenting with different fluids and components.
Mineral oil is ok for experimentation, but for long term material compatibility and fire risk I wouldn't recommend it.
FWIW I co-founded https://submer.com where we've developed an all-embedded computing immersion cooling solution that is virtually compatible with any kind of hardware (even fiber optics) and it's orders of magnitude more efficient than traditional data center cooling technologies.
Apart from the ‘Submerge’ meaning, Submer is also the acronym of our company values, the first being ‘Sustainable’. We are also backed by impact investors like Norrsken VC and PlanetFirst.
If interested in learning more you can check our website (https://submer.com) and some of our job openings here: https://careers.submer.com/