Artificial Intelligence

With the continuous increase in the thermal design power (TDP) of chips, traditional air-cooling methods are struggling to meet the cooling requirements of modern hyperscale data centers. As a result, liquid cooling has emerged as a promising solution due to the high specific heat capacity of liquids.

Thursday 20 July 2023 - Navigating the Liquid Cooling Dominance in Data Centers - An IDTechEx Roadmap; Air cooling: An overview of the traditional air-cooling approach and its benefits and limitations; Direct-to-chip/Cold Plate Cooling: An exploration of cooling methods that involve direct contact between the cooling medium and the chips or the use of cold plates; Immersion cooling: An examination of cooling techniques that utilize immersion of servers or components in dielectric fluids; Coolant comparison and regulations: A comparison of different coolants used in liquid cooling systems, along with relevant regulations; Single-phase and two-phase cooling: An analysis of single-phase and two-phase cooling methods and their applications in data centers; Thermal interface materials (TIMs): An overview of the importance of thermal interface materials in efficient heat transfer within cooling systems.

In a recently published article, AI and Security: Ensuring That Opportunities Outweigh the Threats, IDTechEx discussed the importance of ownership and culpability when it comes to deploying AI tools, especially in the context of creative works. This matter of accountability and the potential insidious use of artificial intelligence in the creation of intellectual property is a theme touched on in the first episode of the new Black Mirror season, "Joan Is Awful".

Anyone with access to social media platforms will likely have heard of ChatGPT by now. Created by OpenAI and released in November 2022, the generative AI tool had 100 million registered users as of three months after release, with it - the world's most advanced chatbot - being used to answer simple queries, write songs, and draft press releases, all with varying degrees of success.

Over the past 16 years, the thermal design power (TDP) of GPUs has quadrupled. With the increasing demand for AI, cloud computing, and crypto mining, IDTechEx expects the power consumption of server boards and data centers to continue rising.

While the current AI boom is only just getting started, an early winner is Nvidia, who - on Tuesday, May 30th - saw the company's market capitalization exceed US$1 trillion for the first time. For a chip designer with no fabrication capabilities of its own, this is a significant moment.

Wednesday 7 June 2023 - AI capabilities and why these matter; The link between AI and semiconductor manufacture; Reasons for government funding initiatives into shoring up domestic semiconductor supply chain capabilities; Outlook, both with regards to the effectiveness of these campaigns, as well as the global semiconductor supply chain and AI chips until 2033.

With the high inflation, increasing labor costs, labor shortage, energy crisis, and hybrid working, the manufacturing industry experienced significant turmoil in 2022. Although some of these have started to get eased, 2023 is still expected to be a challenging year for the manufacturing industry.

Artificial Intelligence has come a long way since the success of DeepMind over Go world champion Lee Sedol in 2016; the world is beginning to change according to the new possibilities afforded by AI. From the robust predictive abilities of OpenAI's ChatGPT - where the AI chatbot can be used for all sorts of purposes, from creating scripts (including malware) to writing academic essays - to AI image generators that are so good that they can win Sony world photography awards, the complexity and capabilities of AI algorithms are growing at a startlingly fast pace.

Materials informatics is the application of data-driven methods, including machine learning techniques, to the field of materials science. This important part of the digital transformation toolbox for the materials industry has wide-ranging benefits, but the ability to enhance the sustainability of materials and their manufacturing processes could be the most impactful of these.