Fujitsu says it is making progress on a cleaner method of producing ammonia, which it believes is a strong candidate for an alternative power source for datacenters. The company said it envisions the machinery to produce the clean ammonia fitting into a shipping container.

The Japanese multinational announced in April that it was working with Icelandic startup Atmonia on the development of new catalysts to create a sustainable process for ammonia production, with Fujitsu supplying the high-performance compute (HPC) resources to discover new materials and catalyst candidates for ammonia synthesis.

Fujitsu said it is now working with datasets received from Atmonia, and is building proof-of-concept models of potential catalysts. These are being developed using a combination of quantum chemical simulations and specially developed AI technology that helps extract insights from the simulation data, according to Koichi Shirahata, a researcher at Fujitsu Laboratories working on the project.

The infrastructure being used for these simulations is mostly Fujitsu's Arm-based Fugaku supercomputer, once the fastest in the world, although the researchers are only using about 100 nodes of the system's full capacity, Shirahata said.

Fujitsu Research Senior Director Surya Josyula told us that the company has been looking into green ammonia over the last year for its potential to serve as an alternative fuel source for its own datacenters.

"Fujitsu, as you can imagine, operates datacenters all over the world to power our own internal businesses. And we also run datacenters on behalf of our customers," Josyula said.

"So what we are currently researching is, once we have green ammonia produced, how can we power our datacenters and use that as a backup power source or even a primary power source?"

According to Fujitsu, there is a wider trend among all the major cloud operators and hyperscale providers to move to 100 percent clean energy, because datacenters currently account for about 1 percent of the world's total greenhouse gases emissions, and the size of datacenters is growing exponentially.

"So there's a move to see when solar and wind are not available, what other sources of energy can be utilized for clean datacenters. And green ammonia would be a logical fit, we believe," Josyula said.

In other words, Fujitsu sees ammonia being used initially as a backup energy source, for circumstances where the wind isn't blowing or the Sun isn't shining, or perhaps where there is a failure of the grid itself. This could involve using ammonia directly as fuel in a generator, or "cracking" it to produce hydrogen to power fuel cells.

However, according to Steve Crolius, president of Carbon Neutral Consulting, if you are going to decarbonize your backup power source, you might as well go the whole nine yards and use it as part of your primary power mix.

"Put yourself in the shoes of the datacenter operator who is committed to fully sustainable operation. Most national grids are still a mix of fossil, nuclear, and an increasing amount of renewable, so you're a long way from the vision of 100 percent zero carbon with that posture, particularly if you're using diesel as a fuel for your backup. So given that, what do you do?"

Ammonia offers a promising alternative because it does not emit CO2 when burned and is much easier to transport and store than hydrogen, according to Crolius. There are already ammonia supply pipelines, for example.

The snag is that commercial ammonia production largely uses the Haber-Bosch process at present, using hydrogen sourced from fossil fuels, and the process itself generates lots of CO2. This is why Fujitsu and Atmonia are working on catalyst technology that will be able to produce ammonia from water, nitrogen from the air, and clean electricity from renewable sources.

"Once you have made electricity and turned it into ammonia," Crolius said, "you now have an energy commodity that is very transportable, very storable, and can be produced at a reasonable cost. So when you line that up with the needs of datacenters, you can have the amount of energy you need at every minute of the day and night available to you, with no ifs or buts, using ammonia as your fuel."

When asked if Fujitsu is working to develop systems that can power datacenters from ammonia, Josyula said the company is "not announcing any public plans right now," that everything is at the research stage, and the technology to create ammonia using catalysts is probably still several years away.

"Catalysts are the key, and companies like Atmonia have the vision," he said. "I mean, they want to produce it in a container, everything is in one shipping container. That's sort of the moonshot idea, but the catalysts are key and we're seeking to create new catalysts using technologies like supercomputing, material sciences, and AI." ®

Microsoft is to deploy its "grid-interactive UPS technology" at the company's datacenter in Dublin, Ireland, later this year to demonstrate how such technology may be used to help decarbonize power grids.

The Redmond software giant disclosed last month how it and power management specialist Eaton were jointly working on technology that would allow the energy storage systems used for backup power in datacenters to also help smooth out any variability in the power grid due to the unpredictability of renewable energy sources.

Now Microsoft is moving to implement this, saying that its datacenter in Dublin will be a part of the solution to this problem later this year.

Liquid cooling specialist Iceotope claims its latest system allows customers to easily convert existing air-cooled servers to use its liquid cooling with just a few minor modifications.

Iceotope’s Ku:l Data Center chassis-level cooling technology has been developed in partnership with Intel and HPE, the company said, when it debuted the tech this week at HPE’s Discover 2022 conference in Las Vegas. The companies claim it delivers energy savings and a boost in performance.

According to Iceotope, the sealed liquid-cooled chassis enclosure used with Ku:l Data Center allows users to convert off-the-shelf air-cooled servers to liquid-cooled systems with a few small modifications, such as removing the fans.

Analysis Jim Chanos, the infamous short-seller who predicted Enron's downfall, has said he plans to short datacenter real-estate investment trusts (REIT).

"This is our big short right now," Chanos told the Financial Times. "The story is that, although the cloud is growing, the cloud is their enemy, not their business. Value is accrued to the cloud companies, not the bricks-and-mortar legacy datacenters."

However, Chanos's premise that these datacenter REITs are overvalued and at risk of being eaten alive by their biggest customers appears to overlook several important factors. For one, we're coming out of a pandemic-fueled supply chain crisis in which customers were willing to pay just about anything to get the gear they needed, even if it meant waiting six months to a year to get it.

The datacenter is dead – at least according to FedEx, which announced plans to close its server farms and transition completely to the cloud, where it hopes to save an estimated $400 million annually.

At FedEx's investor relations day held last week, CIO Rob Carter said FedEx had long been a leader in technology, claiming the company was first to introduce tracking, handheld computers and automated package sorting. The next big movement in tech, Carter went on to say, is migrating all of its systems to the cloud.

"We've been working across this decade to simplify and streamline our technology and systems to create value all along the way by improving productivity, security and reliability," Carter said on the call.

Comment Last month we shared four VMware ESXi alternatives for enterprises hedging their bets over Broadcom's impending takeover of the virtualization giant.

You can find those suggestions and all your comments right here.

But for small to midsized businesses looking for an escape from VMware's stranglehold on virtualization, you may find your next hypervisor is of the free and open source (FOSS) variety. Lord knows you gave us enough recommendations.

Asia In Brief Australia's government has scrapped an app that had been intended to replace paperwork for incoming visitors to the country.

Commissioned last year with a AU$60 million ($41m) budget, the software developed by Accenture worked, but was notoriously difficult to use. Worse still, passengers were still required to complete a paper form when entering Australia.

Australia recently changed government, and incoming cyber security and home affairs minister Clare O'Neill got the job of binning the app.

Many security breaches involve leaks, but not perhaps in the same way as one revealed by noted security consultant Andrew Tierney, who managed to gain unauthorized access to a datacenter via what he delightfully terms the "piss corridor."

Tierney, who works as a consultant for security services outfit Pen Test Partners, revealed in a Twitter thread how one of his more memorable exploits involved demonstrating that it was possible to gain physical access to the supposedly secure area of a datacenter via its toilets.

Posting a diagram to illustrate, Tierney showed that the unnamed facility had a separate bathroom area for the general office space and the secure area where the IT infrastructure is housed. However, the two toilet facilities were adjoined, and Tierney realized there was actually a shared access space for servicing the toilets that ran behind both sets of cubicles, which he christened the "piss corridor."

Castrol, better known for its engine oil, has partnered with cooling specialist Submer to drive the adoption of immersion cooling for datacenter and edge applications.

For those of a certain age, Castrol will forever be associated with TV ads that proclaimed its Castrol GTX product as not just oil, but "liquid engineering." Now, however, it is teaming up with Submer to promote liquid immersion cooling as a way towards more efficient and more sustainable datacenter operations.

The two companies said they will work together on the global supply, development and standardization of next generation immersion cooling fluids. These are typically so-called dielectric fluids that conduct heat but not electricity, enabling components such as server motherboards to be cooled by being completely immersed in the fluid.

Datacenter operator Switch Inc is being sued by investors over claims that it did not disclose key financial details when pursuing an $11 billion deal with DigitalBridge Group and IFM Investors that will see the company taken into private ownership if it goes ahead.

Two separate cases have been filed this week by shareholders Marc Waterman and Denise Redfield in the Federal Court in New York. The filings contain very similar claims that a proxy statement filed by Switch with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in regard to the proposed deal omitted material information regarding Switch's financial projections.

Both Redfield and Waterman have asked the Federal Court to put the deal on hold, or to undo it in the event that Switch manages in the meantime to close the transaction, and to order Switch to issue a new proxy statement that sets out all the relevant material information.

Comment Liquid and immersion cooling have undergone something of a renaissance in the datacenter in recent years as components have grown ever hotter.

This trend has only accelerated over the past few months as we’ve seen a fervor of innovation and development around everything from liquid-cooled servers and components for vendors that believe the only way to cool these systems long term is to drench them in a vat of refrigerants.

Liquid and immersion cooling are by no means new technologies. They’ve had a storied history in the high-performance computing space, in systems like HPE’s Apollo, Cray, and Lenovo’s Neptune to name just a handful.

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