Data Center

Under specific conditions, lasers can cool things down – and that might just be what we need to tackle way-too-toasty data centers. A new technology called laser-based photonic cooling can target tiny hotspots on chips to zap heat away.

In what it calls "the world's first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors," Google has taken another step toward its goal of achieving net-zero emissions from its operational chain by 2030.

In a remarkable topical twofer, not only is Microsoft turning to nuclear power to run its data centers, it's commissioned the restarting of the infamous Three Mile Island station – the site of the worst commercial nuclear accident in US history.

Europe's largest 3D-printed building is a data center in Germany. Named the Wave House, the project harnesses the benefits of 3D printing tech to inject a sense of style into the unglamorous world of cloud-computing infrastructure.

10,000 years in the future, explorers could end up getting rickrolled, thanks to a Global Music Vault due to be built in Norway. It features Microsoft’s Project Silica, a tough new data storage medium that’s never gonna give you up.

3D-printed architecture has gone from strength to strength over the past few years and the latest notable advance comes from Germany, where an ambitious new data center is under construction that's hailed as Europe's largest 3D-printed building.

Future data centers might switch to a storage medium that nature has been using for billions of years – DNA. In a major step towards making that a reality, scientists have created a new system of reading and organizing files using microcapsules.

Liquid cooling is one of the most effective ways to keep computers from overheating. Microsoft has now put a unique spin on the technique, demonstrating a system to cool its cloud servers by dunking the computers into a tank full of boiling liquid.

Magnetic tape may seem an antiquated data storage technology, but its density and capacity is still hard to beat for big data centers. Now, IBM and Fujifilm have created a prototype high-density tape cartridge with a record-breaking 580 TB capacity.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have made magnetic tape using a new material, which allows higher storage density and more protection against interference, as well as a new way to write to the tape using high frequency millimeter waves.

Data centers require heavy-duty cooling and maintenance. Microsoft has now finished a two-year test of an unconventional solution – dropping a data center to the bottom of the sea – and found that it was more reliable than land-based facilities.

​Just over a year after launching a 14 TB hard drive for cloud and data centers, Western Digital has added another terabyte of storage space without increasing the physical dimensions for the new Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD.​