Power demands of data centers have grown from tens to 200 kilowatts in just a few years, a pace that has data center developers scrambling to design future facilities that can handle the load.
“In the next couple of years, it’s going to be 600 kilowatts, and then we’re going to a megawatt,” Tim Heidel, CEO of Veir, told TechCrunch. “We’re speaking to folks that are now trying to wrap their heads around the architecture for how you design data centers that have multi-megawatt racks.”
At those scales, even the low-voltage cables that bring power to the racks start to take up too much space and generate too much heat.
To rein that in, Veir has adapted its superconducting electrical cables to bring them inside the data center. The Microsoft-backed startup’s first product will be a cable system capable of carrying 3 megawatts of low-voltage electricity.
To demonstrate the technology, Veir built a simulated data center near its headquarters in Massachusetts. The cables will be piloted in data centers next year in advance of an expected 2027 commercial launch, Heidel said.
Superconductors are a class of materials that can conduct electricity with zero loss of energy. The only hitch is that they need to be cooled well below freezing temperatures.
Veir had previously focused on using superconductors to improve capacity on long-distance transmission lines. But utilities are cautious and tend to be slow to adopt new technology. While there’s still a good chance utilities will eventually tap superconductors for high-demand transmission lines, that transition is a bit further in the future.
“The pace at which the data center community is moving, evolving, growing, scaling, and tackling challenges is far higher than the transmission community,” Heidel said.
Veir has been in talks with data centers for years. Recently, the tenor of those conversations changed.
“We were seeing a lot of folks saying, ‘Oh this grid interconnection problem is a real thing, and we got to figure out how to solve that.’ But then a handful of potential customers started turning around and saying, we actually have really hard problems to solve on our campuses and inside of our buildings,” he said.
The startup took the same core technology that it had developed for transmission lines and adapted it to the low-voltage needs of data centers. Veir buys the superconductors from the same suppliers, and they’re wrapped in a jacket to contain the liquid nitrogen coolant that keeps the material at -196˚ C (-321˚ F). Termination boxes sit at the end of those cables to transition from superconductors to copper cables.
“We’re really a systems integrator that builds the cooling systems, manufactures the cables, puts the whole system together in order to deliver an enormous amount of power in a small space,” Heidel said.
The result are cables that require 20 times less space than copper while carrying power five times farther, Veir said.
“The AI and data center community is desperate to find solutions today and is desperate to stay ahead. There’s a tremendous amount of competitive pressure to stay at the forefront,” Heidel said.