Sustainable Metal Cloud Eyes Global Rollout to Meet Growing Demand for Energy-Saving Tech

Singapore-headquartered Artificial Intelligence (AI) cloud provider Sustainable Metal Cloud is planning to expand globally as its sees fast-growing demand for its energy saving technology, its CEO said recently.

“Due to client demand, we’re looking to expand in EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa) and North America,” said Tim Rosenfield, Co-Founder of and CEO at Sustainable Metal Cloud.

The startup, a partner of AI chip giant NVIDIA, already operates what it calls “sustainable AI factories” in Australia and Singapore and is set to launch in India and Thailand.

Its clients in Singapore, where it operates over 1,200 of NVIDIA’s high-end H100 AI chips, include Facebook owner Meta, who uses Sustainable Metal Cloud ‘s cloud to run its Llama 2 AI model.

Sustainable Metal Cloud Is Changing Cooling Tech

While most data centres depend on air cooling technology, Sustainable Metal Cloud uses immersion technology, submerging servers from Dell fitted with GPUs (graphics processing units) from NVIDIA in a synthetic oil called polyalphaolefin to draw heat away faster.

The technology behind the approach reduces energy consumption by up to 50% compared to traditional air cooling, according to the CEO.

Demand for AI is expected to increase 10-fold compared with 2023, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The electricity consumption of data centers globally is expected to top 1,000 terawatt-hours in 2026, roughly equivalent to Japan’s total annual consumption, the IEA said in March.

Sustainable Metal Cloud is currently raising USD $400 million in equity and USD $550 million in debt according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The company declined to comment. The fundraising was first reported by Bloomberg.