DOE funds $40 million for advanced data-center cooling

The Department of Energy has awarded $40 million to 15 vendors and university labs as part of a government program that aims to reduce the portion of data centers’ power usage that’s used for cooling to just 5% of their total energy consumption.

The DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) is providing the funding to jumpstart a program called COOLERCHIPS, an acronym for Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability, and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems.

For chip cooling to account for just 5% of total…