Gaming industry relies on energy-efficient water cooling from Cloud&Heat
Dresden, 25.08.2020. Game streaming is the big new trend in the video games industry. Streaming providers, such as Telekom's MagentaGaming, turn almost any terminal device such as a PC, smartphone or smart TV into a high-end gaming console. This means that virtual adventures are possible anytime and anywhere, even without expensive hardware. A current study[1] assumes more than 42 million active users worldwide in 2024 with a turnover of more than 3.8 billion euros. Since the calculations of the gaming streams do not take place locally but in high-performance data centres, the computing power and the power consumption of the server systems increase. At the same time, the energy demand for these applications exceeds that of streaming films or music many times over. The massive growth and the accompanying problems are leading to a rethink of the Provider:
For example, Telekom is launching a pilot together with Cloud&Heat Technologies to reduce the power consumption and thus the environmental impact of gaming servers. An energy-efficient water-cooled data centre significantly reduces the power consumption of cooling. In addition, the waste heat is used to heat buildings. Both lead to a significant reduction in CO2 emissions. For this sustainable and Telekom recently received the Efficient Solutions Label from the Solar Impulse Foundation for its pioneering solution.
MagentaGaming server: Up to 70 percent energy savings thanks to Cloud&Heat technology
For the MagentaGaming project, Cloud&Heat equipped the high-performance data centre in Bonn with an innovative hot water direct cooling system and developed the cooling and building infrastructure together with the Telekom subsidiary Power and Air Solutions. The water-cooled server rack was designed on the basis of the high-performance Nvidia RTX graphics cards and, during the beta phase, has the objective of demonstrating energy savings of around 30 percent compared to conventional air cooling. At the same time, the environmental impact is also reduced: compared* to gaming PCs, cloud gaming with a water-cooled RTX server saves over 44,000 gCO₂ (about 70 %) during one hour of gameplay with a workload of 160 players. This corresponds to a journey of about 570 km from Hamburg to Nuremberg in an average car.
"One of our core considerations when locating our gaming data centres, apart from the lowest possible latencies and distances to the customers, was also the availability of electricity and waste heat power. With Cloud&Heat's technology, we expect to become even more efficient and, above all, to make a major contribution to the environment," says Dominik Lauf, Program Lead MagentaGaming, Deutsche Telekom AG.
"The future of the gaming industry lies in cloud gaming. We are happy to make a decisive contribution with our technology to make the necessary IT infrastructures more sustainable," says Nicolas Röhrs, CEO and co-founder of Cloud&Heat Technologies.
