The power demand of data centers has increased from tens to 200 kilowatts in just a few years, a pace that is leaving data center developers struggling to design future facilities that can handle the load.
“In the next few years, it’s going to be 600 kilowatts, and then we’re going to go up to a megawatt,” Weir CEO Tim Heidel told TechCrunch. “We’re talking to people who are trying to focus their attention on how to design data centers with multi-megawatt racks.”
At those scales, even the low-voltage cables that bring power to the rack begin to take up a lot of space and generate a lot of heat.
To combat that, Veer has adapted its superconducting electrical cables to run inside the data center. The Microsoft-backed startup’s first product will be a cable system capable of carrying 3 megawatts of low voltage power.
To demonstrate the technology, Weir built a simulated data center near its headquarters in Massachusetts. Heidel said the cables will be piloted in data centers next year ahead of a potential 2027 commercial launch.
Superconductors are a class of materials that can conduct electricity with zero energy loss. The only hitch is that they need to be cooled well below zero temperatures.
Weir previously focused on using superconductors to improve capacity on long distance transmission lines. But utilities are cautious and slow to adopt new technology. While there’s still a good chance that utilities will eventually use superconductors for high-demand transmission lines, this transition will occur a little further in the future.
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“The pace at which the data center community is moving, evolving, growing, growing and addressing challenges is far greater than the transmission community,” Heidel said.
Veer has been interacting with data centers for years. Recently, the nature of those conversations changed.
“We were seeing a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, this grid interconnection problem is a real thing, and we have to figure out how to solve it.’ But then a handful of potential customers started turning around and saying, there are really, really hard problems to solve on our campuses and inside our buildings,” he said.
The startup took the same core technology it had developed for transmission lines and adapted it to the low-voltage requirements of data centers. Weir buys superconductors from the same suppliers, and wraps them in a jacket to contain liquid nitrogen coolant that keeps the material at -196˚ C (-321˚ F). Termination boxes sit at the end of those cables to transition from superconductor to copper cables.
“We’re really a systems integrator that builds the cooling systems, builds the cables, puts the whole system together to deliver a huge amount of power in a small space,” Heidel said.
The result are cables that require 20 times less space than copper, while carrying power five times as far, Weir said.
“The AI and data center community today is desperate to find solutions and desperate to stay ahead. There is an enormous amount of competitive pressure to stay ahead of the curve,” Heidel said.