By Braden Cooper, Product Marketing Manager
The most powerful artificial intelligence computing hardware is designed to thrive in a datacenter environment where there is uncapped clean power, near limitless cooling capacity, and a vibration-free environment. The growth of AI use cases in vehicles including automated crop management, autonomous long-haul freight, and military ISR aircraft necessitates the use of datacenter-oriented hardware in vehicles – particularly for initial developments while more customized size, weight, and power (SWaP) optimized embedded platforms are developed. The transition from friendly environmental conditions to the rigors of the road require system designs which mitigate the thermal, structural, and other challenging environmental conditions of the transportable application. The thermal design is in a critical state – with the latest AI-oriented GPUs and CPUs reaching heat flux densities never before seen. Advanced thermal management designs provide a path to solving the heat flux challenge – but each come with advantages and disadvantages in implementation. This infographic highlights some of the methods which can be used to cool systems in AI transportable applications.

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The best cooling method depends on many variables – from heat flux density to the SWaP constraints. With these existing technologies and ongoing industry innovation – powerful enterprise hardware can be used to solve the most demanding AI transportable challenges. The next few years are pivotal in the advancement of thermal management within datacenters – as immersion cooling and improved thermal interface materials see wider adoption. Transitioning these same cooling methods to AI Transportables solves the need for higher compute capacity at the location of data generation.
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