Executive Summary
- HAETAE is a European and South Korean consortium looking to build hardware which runs on light instead of electricity to process information – with potential ramifications for data centre cooling
- “If we think of today’s AI hardware as a steam engine, this new photonics technology has jet propulsion,” explains Miltiadis Moralis, coordinator of the HAETAE consortium
- Elsewhere, Maxwell Labs is developing a photonic cold plate designed to replace or complement traditional air- and water-based cooling systems
Say hello to HAETAE, a European and South Korean consortium looking to build hardware which runs on light instead of electricity to process information – and which could have major ramifications for data centre cooling.
The key technology here is photonics: the generation, detection, and manipulation of light. Many products, devices and applications benefit from photonics technologies, from fiber optics for telecoms, to high-energy lasers for manufacturing, to biosensors and advanced imaging for healthcare.
In the data centre, silicon photonics is emerging as a method of enabling ultra-fast interconnects between servers, storage, and networking equipment. As photons travel at extraordinary speed and generate far less heat, this has an efficiency effect not just in terms of performance, but power consumption.
HAETAE, which has EU funding of €1.49 million, is building processors to ‘resolve future AI bottlenecks.’ “By using light rather than electricity to perform calculations, we can make AI dramatically faster and far more energy-efficient, while opening the door to entirely new computing capabilities,” said Miltiadis Moralis, coordinator of the HAETAE consortium.
“To put it simply, if we think of today’s AI hardware as a steam engine, this new photonics technology has jet propulsion,” Moralis added.
The project is three years in duration, expected to end in September 2027, and includes leading universities, research centres and technology companies from Europe and South Korea. As Photonics21 notes, Europe is providing the leadership in photonics and materials science, while South Korea provides the expertise in semiconductor manufacturing and electronics. The collaboration ‘reflects a broader shift in how next-generation technologies are being developed, as nations seek to reduce strategic dependencies and build more resilient global supply chains’.
This is by no means the only project taking place in this space right now. In the US, last April saw Maxwell Labs announce a research and development agreement with Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico to ‘pioneer laser-based photonic cooling for high-density computer processors.’
Maxwell Labs is ‘spearheading the development of a photonic cold plate designed to replace or complement traditional air- and water-based cooling systems’, the company noted. The goal is much the same: enhancing energy efficiency with unlocking ‘unprecedented’ processor performance.
“By harnessing laser light to target and cool localised hot spots on chips – such as GPUs – the technology aims to reduce power consumption, improve efficiency, and enable energy recovery paradigms not possible with conventional methods,” the company added. Jacob Balma, Maxwell Labs CEO, said at the time that while it is not easy to predict the full impact, the ‘unique capability of light to target and control localised heating’ will ‘fundamentally change the types of problems we can solve with computers.’
As Maxwell Labs noted with how its photonic cold plate can complement other cooling systems, it does not have to be a question of either/or. As far back as 2021, at the OCP Summit, China-based Ruijie Networks unveiled the 25.6T, the first claimed NPO (near-packaged optics) data centre switch incorporating both silicon photonics and liquid cooling technologies.
“To reduce energy consumption of data centres, Ruijie Networks is investing heavily in silicon photonics technology, and also focusing on innovative research into liquid cooling technology for data centres,” the company announced at the time.
When it comes to data centre cooling, therefore, some forward-looking companies are starting to see the light.
