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The Jiufengshan Laboratory has introduced a new gallium nitride power module capable of significantly reducing energy consumption and electricity expenses in artificial intelligence data centers. The Optics Valley of China, where the lab is situated, made this announcement on its WeChat platform today.
Power modules are responsible for converting the high-voltage electricity supplied to data centers into the low-voltage required by XPU processors. These modules typically consume a substantial amount of electricity. However, replacing silicon-based components with chips made from gallium nitride – a third-generation semiconductor material – can reduce power consumption by 30%. This switch also shrinks the module size by 30% and cuts costs in half.
For instance, a one-gigawatt AI data center consumes approximately 8.76 billion kilowatt-hours annually, a volume comparable to the output of a large nuclear power plant operating at full capacity. Of this total, power modules account for about one billion kilowatt-hours, which is 11% of the overall consumption.
Using gallium nitride power modules could decrease energy use in such a data center by nearly 300 million kilowatt-hours each year, saving around CNY 240 million (USD 33.9 million) on electricity costs.
Training and deploying AI models require extensive parallel computing. The chips contain billions of transistors packed into a tiny space, resulting in extremely high power density that can generate heat hotter than the sun’s core, necessitating continuous cooling.
The new gallium nitride power module has successfully completed proof-of-concept testing and is on the verge of entering pilot production. The team leading this project anticipates mass production to begin within three to five years, which will be sufficient to serve a market estimated at over CNY 100 billion (USD 14.1 billion).
The research team has already partnered with several Chinese data center power suppliers, securing orders exceeding CNY 10 million (USD 1.4 million) using gallium nitride semiconductor technology.
This lab specializes in compound semiconductors and was approved by Hubei province in February 2021. Located in the Donghu New Technology Development Zone of Wuhan, it is part of the Optics Valley, designated as a National Optoelectronic Industry Base in 2001.
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