Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced new data center components designed to support the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and customers’ evolving needs. These capabilities combine innovations in power, cooling, and hardware design to create a more energy efficient data center that will underpin further customer innovation.
The new data center components are built to scale across AWS’s infrastructure worldwide, including its 34 Regions, 108 Availability Zones, and other infrastructure offerings like AWS Local Zones. Construction on new AWS data centers, with the full set of components, is expected to begin in early 2025 in the United States.
“AWS continues to relentlessly innovate its infrastructure to build the most performant, resilient, secure, and sustainable cloud for customers worldwide,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of Infrastructure Services at AWS. “These data center capabilities represent an important step forward with increased energy efficiency and flexible support for emerging workloads. But what is even more exciting is that they are designed to be modular, so that we are able to retrofit our existing infrastructure for liquid cooling and energy efficiency to power generative AI (GenAI) applications and lower our carbon footprint.”
AWS has been building large-scale data centers for 18 years and GPU-based servers for AI workloads for 13 years. Today, AWS’s data centers support millions of active customers worldwide, including hundreds of thousands of customers using AWS AI and machine learning (ML) services, and tens of thousands of global customers using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications.
Key Improvements
As generative AI usage continues to grow and GPU capacity demands increase, AWS data centers are adapting to support increasingly higher power densities. Key improvements include:
- Simplified Electrical and Mechanical Design for High Availability
AWS is committed to delivering reliable infrastructure through simplified electrical and mechanical designs, ensuring high reliability since its inception. Recent data center improvements include streamlined electrical distribution and mechanical systems, achieving 99.9999% infrastructure availability and reducing the impact of electrical issues on racks by 89%.
AWS's simplified designs minimize inefficiencies, energy loss, and failure points. For example, a revamped electrical distribution system has reduced potential failure points by 20%. Additional enhancements, such as placing backup power closer to racks and utilizing natural pressure differentials to exhaust hot air, have cut energy consumption and enhanced reliability.
- Innovations in Cooling, Rack Design, and Control Systems
AWS has built a number of new and enhanced capabilities to offer customers the most performant, highly available, and energy efficient infrastructure possible. New data center innovations include:
- Liquid Cooling: AWS leverages liquid cooling for high-density AI servers, integrating innovative liquid-to-chip solutions in both new and existing data centers. Its hybrid cooling systems seamlessly combine air and liquid cooling, supporting powerful AI chipsets like AWS Trainium2 and NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, along with network switches and storage servers. This flexible design, developed with leading chipmakers, ensures maximum performance and efficiency for traditional workloads and AI models at optimal costs.
- Support for High-Density AI Workloads: AWS is maximizing power usage by optimizing how it positions racks in a data center. This was achieved through software powered by data and generative AI that predicts the most efficient way to land servers. AWS will now reduce the amount of stranded power—energy that is available but unused or underutilized—and make more efficient use of the energy available.
- Updated Control Systems: AWS has implemented an in-house control system across its electrical and mechanical devices, standardizing monitoring, alarms, and operations. Using proprietary telemetry tools, AWS ensures real-time diagnostics and troubleshooting, maintaining optimal conditions for customers. Increased redundancy and reduced complexity in control systems contribute to 99.9999% infrastructure availability.
When combined, these innovations enable AWS to deliver 12% more compute power per site for customer workloads. These changes will reduce the overall number of data centers needed to deliver the same amount of compute capacity.
- Increased Energy Efficiency and Sustainability
For many years, AWS has been a pioneer in improving energy efficiency and sustainability across its infrastructure. Research estimates AWS’s infrastructure is currently up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises infrastructure, and when workloads are optimized on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be reduced by up to 99%. In 2023, Amazon achieved its goal to match all of the electricity consumed by its operations with 100% renewable energy—seven years ahead of its 2030 goal.
AWS continuously revaluates how its data centers operate and determines ways to optimize infrastructure energy usage more efficiently through ongoing innovation. The new components cater to energy efficiency and sustainability through the following upgrades:
- A more efficient cooling system that is expected to reduce mechanical energy consumption by up to 46% compared to its previous design during peak cooling conditions, without increasing water usage on a per-megawatt basis. Design changes include a new single-sided cooling system, reduction in cooling equipment, and introduction of liquid cooling capabilities.
- Reduction of embodied carbon in the concrete of the data center building shell by up to 35%, compared to the industry average. AWS is adopting specifications for lower-carbon steel and concrete, and optimizing the structural design to use less steel overall.
- Backup generators will be able to run on renewable diesel—a biodegradable and non-toxic fuel that can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by up to 90% over the fuel’s lifecycle when compared to diesel. AWS has already started transitioning to renewable diesel to power backup generators at existing data centers in Europe and in America.
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