Russia Launches Competence Center to Improve Data Centers

The parties seek to establish a competence center that will stimulate innovations in optoelectronics, photonics, and PICs for data centers and other domains. The agreement is designed to support scientific and technological projects for producing novel elements and devices based on these technologies (from research and numerical modeling to manufacturing mockups, prototypes, and samples) and involves a spectrum of services across these fields: technological solutions, engineering and technical expertise, production capacities, and commercialization.

“Advanced IT and AI development, including such resource-intensive tasks as computations, modeling, and others, requires massive amounts of power and without this supply, innovative digital tools and strong AI are impossible to produce. By implementing photon technologies, we can simplify processes, which are resource-demanding and available to few companies worldwide, by tenfold. This is a great example of how fundamental science can affect applied R&D – working side by side with industry experts we can reach the next technological level," notes Vladimir Vasilyev, Rector of ITMO University.

“Russia boasts strong research schools in photonics and optoelectronics, and our task is to transform this potential into competitive products. Combining ITMO's academic expertise with United Heavy Machinery's production capabilities will allow us to create a center that will cover the entire product lifecycle: from designing and numerical modeling to prototyping and commercialization. It’s vital for us that the process doesn't stop at the lab sample stage; our center will help bring innovations to production,” says Alexander Mungalov, the managing director of Rusnano Group’s Fund for Infrastructure and Educational Programs.

Next-gen data centers will be based on a hybrid approach that combines photonic and conventional microelectronic technologies to increase energy-efficiency and performance at all levels of their architecture – from network infrastructure to server racks. The integration of optoelectronics and PICs, on the other hand, will allow for data centers to be located in warmer regions and will also help significantly reduce costs on electricity and maintenance of cooling systems and other equipment, as well as accelerate distributed computing for AI tasks.