The ZVEI, as the central voice of the electrical and digital industry in Germany, has presented its Electrifying Ideas Award for the fourth time. A jury comprising prominent figures recognised groundbreaking developments that make efficient use of energy and bring about significant progress for the economy and society. Federal Minister for Research Dorothee Bär presented the award on 20 May at the ZVEI’s eSummit in Berlin – the summit of the electrical and digital industry.

“Technologies such as these are absolutely crucial if we are to build a high-performance AI infrastructure in Germany and Europe. Without innovative cooling concepts, the enormous computing capacities of modern AI systems cannot be operated either energy-efficiently or sustainably. I congratulate the team from Rittal, GSI and etalytics on this outstanding achievement, which demonstrates the significant impact that can be achieved when industry, research and technological expertise come together,” says Prof. Dr Martin Keller, President of the Helmholtz Association, of which GSI is a member.

“The expansion of AI-capable infrastructure in Europe must pick up considerable pace”

“We are very grateful to the jury for deciding to award us this prize. It draws attention to a pressing issue at just the right time. The expansion of AI-capable infrastructure in Europe must pick up pace considerably,” says Prof. Dr Friedhelm Loh, owner and CEO of the Friedhelm Loh Group: “As a global technology leader, we have accepted this responsibility and laid the groundwork. Nevertheless, there are no guarantees of success for implementation. We must work hard to achieve this and set the right priorities in industry, research and politics.”

Cooperation between research and industry

“This award demonstrates how important cooperation between research and industry is. Technology transfer paves the way for findings from cutting-edge research to be translated into concrete applications,” says Prof. Dr Thomas Nilsson, Scientific Director of GSI and FAIR. Dr Katharina Stummeyer, Administrative Managing Director of GSI and FAIR, adds: “Together with Rittal and etalytics, GSI and FAIR have been able to translate innovative and sustainable solutions from basic research into industrial practice – for the benefit of science, business and society.”

Remaining competitive in Germany in the future

Thomas Weber, Co-Founder and CSO of etalytics, adds: “If we want to remain competitive in Germany in the future, we must make the best possible use of new AI technologies. This is precisely what the collaboration between Rittal, GSI and etalytics has achieved through the combination of engineering expertise and AI technologies: the context of the cooling system was specifically transferred to the AI application and made usable there.”

Cooling technology as a trailblazer for AI sovereignty

Artificial intelligence promises rapid progress for research, industry and everyday life – with significant implications for Germany as a business location. Its growth is also being driven in the engine room of digitalisation: in data centres, where new high-performance processors (GPUs) process enormous volumes of data for AI applications. New architectures for cooling and power supply are required here, as established air-cooling concepts have long since reached their physical limits.

This is precisely where the nominated project from Germany, drawing on international expertise, comes into its own: Rittal has developed a direct liquid cooling system that uses water to absorb heat directly from the chips. This enables computing power of more than one million watts to be achieved in a very confined space – modular, easy to maintain and designed for large-scale, round-the-clock operation. In collaboration with GSI, the system was commissioned at the Green IT Cube in Darmstadt and further developed to series production readiness. The green GSI data centre offers the ideal environment: modern data centre architecture with maximum energy efficiency, high-performance computing for the FAIR particle accelerator, and the Digital Open Lab as a development platform. The concept complements etalytics with AI-supported energy optimisation based on digital twins and AI-based control algorithms, in order to reduce the carbon footprint even further.

From a bottleneck to a key technology with three partners

The result: what began as a niche technology for specialised applications has become a tried-and-tested, mass-production concept for rapid scaling – well-suited to spearheading the expansion of a robust AI infrastructure in Europe, backed by expertise and high value-added depth.

Rapid, systematic scaling is a key part of Rittal’s international business. The family-owned company from Hesse accelerates its customers’ processes not only in industry through systems engineering, software and automation. The global player also supplies around 180,000 server racks annually to the major cloud providers in the USA and Asia, known as hyperscalers. Rittal is also working with them within the Open Compute Project (OCP) on the international specifications for the AI factories of the future – for racks and, increasingly, for cooling and power distribution.

GSI is internationally renowned above all for its unique infrastructure for fundamental research. At the future FAIR accelerator centre, researchers from all over the world will conduct experiments to gain new insights into the structure of matter and the evolution of the universe. Beyond research, GSI’s ‘Digital Open Lab’ specifically promotes the transfer of technologies and innovations to industry and the digital economy. External partners can utilise the infrastructure and IT expertise for joint development projects and collaborations centred on data centre infrastructure, high-performance computing and AI.

etalytics ensures transparency regarding highly relevant energy consumption and optimisation via an AI-supported platform. Having emerged from a research group at TU Darmstadt, the start-up is bringing DeepTech developments from the fields of data analysis, AI and energy sciences from the research sphere into practice on an ever-larger scale and for ever-larger companies. Using digital twins of the system, AI thus ensures greater energy efficiency when deploying AI applications.

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