This week in charts
The Big 5 vs. S&P Energy: CAPEX as a share of operating cash flow
Asset-light vs. asset-heavy companies
Market capitalization – asset-light vs. asset-heavy companies
S&P 500 index market capitalization by sector since 1980
Predictive power of valuation entry points over various holding periods
S&P 500 Index Real Estate sub-industry weights
Relative P/E of Health Care vs. S&P 500 Index at historic lows
Health Care mergers & acquisitions deal counts
Drug development time savings – with and without the use of A.I.
Share buybacks announced but not executed
Retail investors buying gold
Keeping cool: heat a key challenge for data centers and AI
The global boom in data centers as companies increasingly outsource information storage and ramp up use of energy-intensive artificial intelligence is creating a key challenge for the industry - how to keep cool.
An outage at the world's biggest exchange operator CME Group from late Thursday that halted trade on its popular currency platform and in futures spanning foreign exchange, commodities, Treasuries and stocks has put a spotlight on data centers overheating.
The problem was a cooling issue at data centers operated by Dallas-headquartered CyrusOne, which operates more than 55 centers in the U.S., Europe and Japan.
What causes the heat?
High-powered AI and cloud servers crunching data need huge amounts of power, which gives off intense heat that traditional air cooling systems are often unable to cool properly.
Data centers contain racks of servers stacked together which are constantly turned on, consuming power. As they heat up, they require constant cooling.
What can data center operators do about it?
More data centers are looking to use water or specialized coolants instead of air cooling, as liquid cooling can be 3,000 times more efficient than air at removing heat.
Liquid cooling however can create its own challenges, including potential leaks, corrosion and the need for specialized maintenance. It can also be water intensive.
Companies are looking to find ways to reduce outside coolants. Microsoft last year launched a new data center design that consumes zero water for cooling.
According to the company, its new technologies recycle water through a closed loop, circulating between the servers and chillers to dissipate heat without needing a fresh supply.
There are also systems to recover and reuse waste heat from data centers.
How common are outages linked to cooling issues?
Mewton said that in general data center outages were "extremely uncommon" because of contractual requirements for operators to keep them almost always online.
"You need to be up more than 99.99% of the time sometimes," he said.
While outages overall were fairly unusual, specific issues directly affecting cooling systems were "even rarer", Mewton said. "What I most often hear (about) is obviously power issues," he said.
A wave of deal-making for data center cooling
The global appetite for data centers has sparked a wave of deal-making across the industry as companies race to build capacity to meet the surge in power and cooling needs.
Law firm White and Case estimates that up to 40% of total energy consumption in data centers is spent on cooling them down, making it a big business.
This week’s fun finds
Last weekend our office transformed into a holiday playground for EdgePointers' kids. They bounced in an inflatable castle, had their faces painted and created their own art canvases. An afternoon packed with laughter and seasonal cheer!
How Your Brain Creates ‘Aha’ Moments and Why They Stick
Insights are not limited to geniuses: We have these cognitive experiences all the time when solving riddles or dealing with social or intellectual problems. They are distinct from analytical problem-solving, such as the process of doing formulaic algebra, in which you arrive at a solution slowly and gradually as if you’re getting warmer. Instead, insights often follow periods of confusion. You never feel as if you’re getting warmer; rather, you go from cold to hot, seemingly in an instant. Or, as the neuropsychologist Donald Hebb, known for his work building neurobiological models of learning, wrote in the 1940s, sometimes “learning occurs as a single jump, an all-or-none affair.”
An abrupt cognitive shift in how the mind understands information is known as a representational change. Although researchers have inferred sudden shifts in understanding from the behavior of subjects, they have not pinned down how the brain supports representational change.
During moments of insight, representational change typically occurs, said John Kounios, a cognitive neuroscientist at Drexel University and co-author of the book The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain. “The question is: How is it occurring?”
