Cooling copper plates could slash data center energy use by 90%
Researchers have developed a new cooling technology using 3D-printed copper plates that could reduce data center energy consumption by over 90%. This innovation addresses the significant energy demand for cooling, which currently accounts for about 30% of data center electricity use. By optimizing the design of cooling plates, the technology promises to enhance efficiency in managing heat generated by high-performance chips.
- ▪Data centers consumed 485 TWh of electricity in 2025, with 30% dedicated to cooling.
- ▪The new copper-plate technology could reduce cooling-related electricity consumption from 30% to just 1.1%.
- ▪Conventional cooling systems struggle to manage the heat generated by modern AI accelerators, necessitating more efficient solutions.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 640 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | New Atlas |
| Canonical URL | https://newatlas.com/energy/cooling-copper-plates-data-center-energy-use/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 18:15:55 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T18:40:02.940Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T18:40:02.940Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ixl8Qu9c10kl |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Energy Cooling copper plates could slash data center energy use by 90% By Etiido Uko May 20, 2026 Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit Flipboard Email / Cooling copper plates could slash data center energy use by 90% A microscope image of tiny fin structures on the surface of the copper platesCell Reports Physical Science, Bazmi et al. View 1 Image 1/1 A microscope image of tiny fin structures on the surface of the copper platesCell Reports Physical Science, Bazmi et al. In 2025, data centers consumed 485 TWh of electricity. Thirty percent of that, more than the entire annual power consumption of Sweden, went to cooling.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at New Atlas.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from New Atlas
