AI chips are designed for freezing weather they will never see
Dropping a cold weather requirement the hardware will never face frees up speed for hot AI work.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · The Two Harvard Dropouts Who raised $800M to take on NVIDIAAI chips are still designed as if they will run in freezing temperatures, even though AI data centers never get that cold.
Gavin Urtz, a founder of the AI chip startup Etched, gave the example when explaining why his company thinks mainstream chips waste performance. Chip design software, known as EDA tools, checks what speed a chip can reliably hit under different conditions, called corners, including temperature. The default settings assume the chip must still hit full speed near freezing.
Urtz said, "I've never seen an AI data center with ice in it," and its chips will never really run below 80 degrees C anyway. By dropping a requirement that does not matter, his team can make changes throughout the system.
The payoff compounds, in his telling: 20 percent here, 50 percent there, double somewhere else, adding up to a system that is radically better because it is built for one hot job, not every possible job.
Questions people ask
What are EDA tools?
EDA stands for electronic design automation. These are the software programs chip companies use to draw, test, and verify a chip before it is manufactured, including whether electrical signals will arrive on time at different voltages and temperatures.
Do chips actually run better in the cold?
Yes. Cold silicon has less electrical resistance, so signals move faster and chips can run at higher speeds. That is why the freezing test is demanding, and why skipping it lets designers trade that unused margin for performance where it counts, at high heat.
Why do AI data centers run so hot?
AI chips pack enormous computing power into a small area and draw huge amounts of electricity, and almost all of that electricity becomes heat. Packed by the thousands into racks and kept working constantly, they keep the building hot even with elaborate liquid cooling.