EcoCloud

Applied Machine Learning Day
2024-03-25 | SwissTech Convention Center, Rue Louis Favre 2, Ecublens, EPFL, 1024
We are happy to announce that Peter de Bock, Vice President of Data Center Energy and Cooling at Eaton, will visit the EcoCloud Center, and give a seminar.
This talk will be followed by a standing lunch on the terrace of the BC building.
AI data centers have crossed a threshold: we are no longer designing facilities, but city‑scale energy systems that convert power into tokens, and tokens into artificial intelligence. Rising rack densities, shrinking deployment timelines, and grid constraints demand a shift from enterprise design approaches to end‑to‑end energy stack optimization, from grid interconnection and power conversion to compute delivery and thermal rejection.
On the power side, three interdependent domains must scale together: IT distribution in the whitespace (480 V AC and emerging 800 V DC architectures), liquid cooling infrastructure where CDUs and high‑amperage busways become mission‑critical loads, and centralized cooling plants where medium voltage enables efficient delivery of industrial-scale power. Physics governs these choices, with current driving footprint and fault domains defining availability.
On the thermal side, the primary efficiency lever is the temperature delivered to silicon. Advanced cold plate designs with low thermal resistance enable hot‑water cooling aligned with chip roadmaps, reducing reliance on chillers and reframing performance around compute output per unit energy. Thermal resistance becomes the key architectural driver of system efficiency.
At scale, resilience requires coordinated power quality, ride‑through for cooling loads, and digital control layers. The advantage lies in engineering the entire energy stack—unlocking step‑change gains in efficiency and availability.
Dr. Peter De Bock is Vice President of Data Center Energy and Cooling at Eaton, where he is responsible for strategic technology in energy and cooling, and plays a key role in the integration of Boyd Thermal.
Previously Peter served as a Program Director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E, where he architected, and managed the COOLERCHIPS program, a breakthrough initiative establishing the technical foundation for hot‑water–cooled data centers, collapsing cooling energy use from ~30–40% to single digits while enabling scalable AI infrastructure, elimination of water use and improving heat reuse potential.
He also led the ASCEND program, pioneering Megawatt class ultra-high power-density electric propulsion architectures that established new benchmarks for integrated motor, drive, and thermal system performance.
Prior to ARPA-E, he spent nearly two decades at General Electric Research as a principal engineer in thermosciences and platform leader for power and thermal management systems.
He holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Cincinnati and MSc degrees from the University of Warwick and the University of Twente, and is an ASME Fellow, IEEE Senior Member, former chair of the ASME K-16 committee, and an inventor on 68 patents and applications.

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