Lenovo's new 16-inch Legion 9i is the world's first liquid-cooled laptop without the need for an external pump, pairing top-of-the-line Intel Core i9-HX hardware with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 for prolonged gaming sessions. We've seen Lenovo offer the Legion 5 Pro and the Legion 5i, both gaming laptops that tried to offer slimmer profiles for mainstream use. Lenovo representatives say that the new 9i attempts to combine the best of both worlds. The Lenovo Legion 9i represents a partnership between Lenovo and Cooler Master, and CM's Coldfront cooling system (dubbed the Legion Coldfront, here) has been integrated inside the laptop. An array of three fans sucks in air through 6,333 intake vents and routes air through the chassis.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a subject of great debate when it comes to ethics, but one area people might not think about is its carbon footprint. A study released last year by MIT Technology Review found that training a "regular" AI using a single high-performance graphics card has the same carbon footprint as a flight across the United States. Training a more sophisticated AI was even worse, pumping five times more CO2 into the atmosphere than the entire life cycle of an American car, including its manufacturing. Whether it's the latest AI or machine learning algorithm that's active on a system, a new 5G network deployed at a commercial building or people streaming the latest Twitch gaming video, people generate and consume a lot of data. All that data must be captured, stored, analyzed and sent back out, which requires significant amounts of processing power.

As artificial intelligence takes off in enterprise settings, so will data center power usage. AI is many things, but power efficient is not one of them. For data centers running typical enterprise applications, the average power consumption for a rack is around 7 kW. Yet it's common for AI applications to use more than 30 kW per rack, according to data center organization AFCOM. That's because AI requires much higher processor utilization, and the processors – especially GPUs – are power hungry.

IoT Evolution Keynoter, Schneider Electric, with Avnet and Iceotope, announce the creation of the industry's first commercially-available integrated rack with chassis-based, immersive liquid cooling. Optimized for compute-intensive applications, the solution combines a high-powered GPU server with Iceotope's liquid cooling technology to increase energy efficiency. The system is EcoStruxure Ready since the solution is available with next-generation data center management software, EcoStruxure IT Expert and digital service EcoStruxure Asset Advisor. This solution is ideal for applications such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning algorithm training development, where high compute demands more energy use. In a recent report published by Gartner, liquid cooling was identified as a technology to watch.

Data center rack density is trending higher, prompted by growing adoption of powerful hardware to support artificial intelligence applications. It's an ongoing trend with a new wrinkle, as industry observers see a growing opportunity for specialists in high-density hosting, perhaps boosted by the rise of edge computing. Increases in rack density are being seen broadly, with 67 percent of data center operators seeing increasing densities, according to the recent State of the Data Center survey by AFCOM. With an average power density of about 7 kilowatts per rack, the report found that the vast majority of data centers have few problems managing their IT workloads with traditional air cooling methods. But there are also growing pockets of extreme density, as AI and cloud applications boost adoption of advanced hardware, including GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs.