A Configurable Thermal-Dynamic Model for AI Data Center Cooling Load Simulation

Abstract

Cooling demand constitutes a significant and flexible component of AI data center electricity consumption, but time-synchronized measurements are scarce and constant coefficient-of-performance models cannot represent thermal dynamics. This letter proposes a configurable thermal dynamic simulation model for hybrid air- and liquid-cooled data centers. Unlike existing models centered on temperature prediction or equipment-level cooling analysis, the proposed model is designed to generate dynamic cooling electricity profiles for long-duration power system studies. The model is validated using operational telemetry from the Marconi100 supercomputer. Compared with the baseline, the proposed model reduces the mean absolute error from 95.80 to 20.88~kW and the root-mean-square error from 109.79 to 27.27~kW. Evaluation over approximately 520 daily profiles further shows improved reproduction of daily peak demand and intraday variability. The proposed model provides a computationally tractable means of generating physically interpretable cooling load profiles for power system studies.