Page 11 - Winter 2026

Industry News Industry News

NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY

LAUNCHES HOPEFUL POWERING THE

FUTURES AI CHALLENGE AI DATA CENTRE

Northumbria University has launched a Project Lead, Professor Pam Briggs, states: Around the world economies are investing heavily advanced cooling and specialised hardware to
groundbreaking national exhibition challenge in new data centres and new technologies are handle the computational intensity of training and
“ Young people are growing up in a world where AI
called the Hopeful Futures AI Challenge, which constantly being developed, such as the NVIDIA Vera deploying large-scale AI models.
is increasingly shaping their education, healthcare,
invites 11 to 16 year-olds to imagine and shape the Rubin NVL72 Supercluster, which combines 72 NVIDIA
entertainment, and future careers, yet they’re rarely Delivering much greater levels of power, while
future of artificial intelligence. Rubin GPUs and 36 NVIDIA Vera CPUs with NVIDIA
asked what they want that future to look like. This ensuring that AI can reach its full potential, has
ConnectX-9 Super NICs and NVIDIA Bluefield-4 DPUs
Led by a team of researchers at the university, the challenge is about flipping that script and saying required the re-imagining of how the IT server racks
into one platform.
challenge asks teams to imagine that they have : your voice matters, your imagination matters, are structured in data centres, and how best to
been hired by the Global Future Tourism Board to and we want to hear your hopes for how AI can NVIDIA claims that with these devices it has minimised derive and deliver that power “.
promote what life could look like in 2050, and then make the world better. By focusing on real-world energy consumption and water usage as well as
In order to address the rise in server rack demands
create a travel experience in the form of a brochure, scenarios such as climate change and mental maximising density and efficiency, but despite this
from kilowatts to megawatts, the industry has
blog, social media campaign or video that envisages health and wellbeing, we’re empowering young power availability remains the single most decisive
adopted 800V high-voltage DC (HVDC) architectures,
a hopeful future based on Environmental Futures, the people to think critically and creatively about the factor in determining the viability of new data centre
which improve efficiency and reliability, reduce copper
Future of Learning and Healthcare. role AI can play in solving the challenges that projects.
cabling and enable more compact system designs.
matter most to them and their generation “.
The challenge has been made possible through In ‘Cleaning up AI’ (New Electronics, Volume 59, Issue
AI workloads are pushing rack power far beyond
Northumbria’s Citizen-centred Artificial Intelligence Source: Education Today, 8th. January 1, p12-14) the journal’s editor Neil Tyler, highlights a
what existing architectures can handle, which has
(CCAI), a UKRI-funded initiative and research centre warning given by Goldman Sachs to the effect that ‘AI
prompted NVIDIA to lead an initiative to transition data
that is focused on developing AI systems that are leadership in AI could falter due to power shortages as
centre power distribution from the current 54V DC
fair, transparent and beneficial to ordinary people by spare grid capacity drops below critical thresholds’.
rack-level systems towards centralised 800V HVDC.
involving them in the design process.
The author continues: This aims to support 1MW-plus IT racks aligned with
CCAI includes a Centre for Doctoral Thinking, which NVIDIA rack scale systems such as Kyber and post-
“AI has fundamentally reshaped data centre
trains PhD researchers, and a broader Centre for Blackwell GPU platforms.
design and operations and AI-driven facilities are
Responsible AI that aims to ensure that technology
now having to support extreme power density,
serves all citizens equally.
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