Japan Renewable Energy Corporation have announced that stable operation has been achieved at the data centre constructed on the grounds of its solar power plant in Nagano prefecture, supplying computing power through 100 per cent renewable energy. The data centre will be used by distributed cloud computing solutions provider Morgenrot to provide its M:CPP GPU cloud service.
This project is based on a partnership between JRE and Morgenrot announced last year, and is the first example of a renewable energy provider in Japan launching a computing business located outside Japan’s large metropolitan areas that is attached to a solar power plant.
In December 2022, the data centre commenced commercial operation, primarily for CG rendering, and once stable operation was verified, it was adopted for the M:CPP service in April 2023, and will support additional applications such as AI and simulation. This containerised data centre, accommodating 40 AMD and NVIDIA GPU servers installed within the JRE Nagano Omachi Solar Power Plant in Omachi, Nagano prefecture, has to date achieved a high rate of capacity utilisation and stable operations for a green data centre with zero CO2 emissions.
The data centre employs a ‘chiller-less’ cooling system that uses water drawn from a well for the server cooling equipment, with no need for CFCs refrigerants that emit greenhouse gasses. Thus, it operates as an environmentally-friendly and exceptionally energy-efficient installation, designed to deliver a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.1.
Both JRE and Morgenrot said that they will continue to work across industrial boundaries to construct new business models that will lead to decarbonisation of critical social infrastructure, thereby using renewable energy for transitioning existing businesses to carbon-neutrality.
JRE hopes to further promote renewable energy and related businesses with a mission to go beyond kilowatt-hour-based value to create new service-based value by using renewable energy not only for providing value in terms of power generated, but also for delivering value-added services.
