(Yicai) Dec. 4 -- The Jiufengshan Laboratory has rolled out a gallium nitride power module which can significantly cut power consumption and electricity costs in artificial intelligence data centers, the Optics Valley of China, where the lab is based, announced on its WeChat account today.

Power modules, which convert the high-voltage electricity being fed into data centers into the low-voltage that XPU processors need, use up large amounts of electricity. But if chips made of silicon-based gallium nitride, which is a third-generation semiconductor material, are used to replace the silicon used in traditional power module chips, it can cut power consumption by 30 percent, reduce the size of the module by 30 percent and halve the cost.

For example, a one-gigawatt AI computing center consumes around 8.76 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, equivalent to the amount of electricity generated by a large nuclear power plant at full capacity. Of this, the power modules consume one billion kilowatt-hours of electricity or 11 percent of the total.

However, gallium nitride power modules can reduce power consumption in a computing center of this size by nearly 300 million kilowatt-hours a year, slashing the electricity bill by CNY240 million (USD33.9 million).

Training and running AI models requires massive parallel computing. Chips pack billions of transistors in an extremely small space, creating extremely high-power density, which can even be hotter than the sun’s core, so they need constant power to cool down.

The gallium nitride power module has completed proof-of-concept testing and will soon start pilot production, said Li Sicao, head of the research team. He predicted that mass production will start within three to five years’ time, enough to meet the demand of a market worth over CNY100 billion (USD14.1 billion).

Li’s team has already used gallium nitride semiconductor technology to form partnerships with many Chinese data center power suppliers, securing orders worth over CNY10 million (USD1.4 million).

The Jiufengshan Lab is a new type of research and development institution that focuses on compound semiconductors. It was given the greenlight by Hubei province in February 2021. Optics Valley is located in the Donghu New Technology Development Zone in Wuhan, central Hubei province, and was approved as a National Optoelectronic Industry Base in 2001.

Editor: Kim Taylor