Request for Information (RFI): Increasing Data Center Energy Efficiency | DE FOA 0002495

Opportunity Information: Apply for DE FOA 0002495

The Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) issued this notice as a Request for Information (RFI) focused on increasing data center energy efficiency. It is important to read it for what it is: a market and technical input-gathering exercise, not a call for proposals and not a promise of funding. ARPA-E is using the RFI to collect ideas, evidence, and perspectives that could shape a future research program, but at the time of the notice there is no Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) and no applications for financial assistance are being accepted.

The RFI is motivated by the rapid growth in digital services and the computing infrastructure behind them. ARPA-E highlights that online activity has been expanding for years and is expected to accelerate further due to trends like virtual collaboration, artificial intelligence and machine learning, machine vision, and augmented/virtual reality. It also points to an approaching surge in machine-to-machine communications, often described as the Internet of Things (IoT), where vehicles, aircraft, industrial equipment, and consumer devices continuously generate and exchange data. All of this demand ultimately lands in data centers, which host the servers and supporting equipment that enable these services across a range of operating models, from small enterprise facilities and co-location sites to very large hyperscale campuses.

A central concern is the energy impact of this growth. The notice cites projections that U.S. data centers consume more than 75 billion kWh of electricity annually. While the computing load (described as a dramatic growth in compute instances over the prior decade) has surged, total energy use has not risen at the same pace in the past, largely because of efficiency gains from better semiconductors and operational strategies like virtualization and "economization." However, ARPA-E notes that the historical trend of transistor scaling that reliably delivered energy savings, commonly tied to Moore's law, hit an inflection point around 2016. With those automatic efficiency gains slowing, and with data demand still climbing quickly, ARPA-E expects data center energy use to rise, which makes new approaches to efficiency increasingly urgent.

The goal behind the potential future program described in the RFI is to support novel, potentially transformative technologies that improve the energy efficiency of both current and next-generation data centers, ideally across a wide range of applications and facility types. The notice signals interest in breakthroughs that could change the underlying performance and efficiency limits, not just incremental improvements. ARPA-E frames the opportunity broadly, suggesting it could include stand-alone component innovations as well as system-level concepts that integrate multiple improvements together.

Examples of technical areas ARPA-E explicitly calls out include disruptive innovations in: (1) efficient and reliable power supply and power delivery, (2) data processing approaches that reduce energy per computation or per unit of useful work, (3) thermal management and cooling methods that lower overhead energy while maintaining reliability, and (4) server, rack, or whole-building designs that enable step-change efficiency improvements. In other words, ARPA-E is casting a wide net across the full data center stack, from electricity conversion and distribution, to compute architectures and workload handling, to heat removal, to physical and facility-scale design choices.

Administratively, the opportunity is listed under Funding Opportunity Number DE-FOA-0002495 with CFDA number 81.135 and is associated with the Department of Energy, ARPA-E. The listing shows funding instrument types like cooperative agreements and grants, but in practice those are standard catalog fields and do not change the core message: this particular notice is not a funding opportunity. The eligibility field is described as unrestricted (open to any type of entity, subject to any clarifications in the full text), which is typical for an RFI because ARPA-E wants broad input from industry, academia, labs, non-profits, and other stakeholders. The RFI was posted March 3, 2021, and the original response deadline was April 30, 2021. The expected awards are listed as zero and the award ceiling as 1, reinforcing that no awards are being made under this RFI.

In practical terms, the RFI is an invitation to help ARPA-E understand what technical approaches look most promising, what barriers or research gaps need to be addressed, and how a future program could be structured to unlock major efficiency gains in data centers. Any information submitted in response may be used for ARPA-E program planning and could influence whether a future FOA is released and what topics, performance targets, and project scopes it emphasizes. For the full text and submission details, ARPA-E directed readers to its solicitation portal at https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov.

• The Department of Energy, Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy in the opportunity zone benefits, science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Request for Information (RFI): Increasing Data Center Energy Efficiency" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 81.135.
• This funding opportunity was created on Mar 03, 2021.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Apr 30, 2021. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $1.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

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