Big bet on Gallium

Anastasi in Tech

  Data centers are power-hungry. A lot of the power goes through cooling. Data centers plan to scale to 5 Gigawatt.

  There's a bottleneck that lives between the chips. The gold rush is solving the heat problem.

  Copper is the old way, and now is the wrong way. It has reached its limits. Companies need to get around the copper problem.

  Light is the new way, but it doesn't work well with silicon and copper.

  A new way may have been found with the use of Germanium arsenide.

  Optics works great, and is everywhere where it is needed most, inside the chips themselves. All the power is being lost in the silicon and copper. Just a few more centimeters separate from a solution.

 The one who cracks this problem will control the AI space.

  Materials research non-profit organization (Imec) in Belgium may have found a solution. They searched through all the periodic table. The settled on Gallium arsenide. Once you couldn't build lasers on silicon, but a geometric trick enabled them to place the gallium arsenide on the silicon chip.

 But there's still a problem. Gallium gets it closer, but not all the way. Something new is needed. Enter Germanium. In particular, a compound of Germanium and Silicon. In theory, this should work, but there's a problem with putting it into the crystal. They tweaked it and tweaked it until they got it to work well.

 These two innovations allowed them to finally bridge the 2 cm gap. Now the money guys are betting on this development.

 Optics is the future, not copper.