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45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#141

Post by frollogaston »

loeg wrote: post #88
why_at wrote: post #72

Maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't understand what the innovation is here. I get that they're using liquid coolant at higher than usual temperatures, but why couldn't they do that before? Most of the comparison in the article is for air cooled datacenters but what about other liquid cooled ones? Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what te…

You have to design your hardware to tolerate being run in consistently hotter conditions. There's a tradeoff between cooling cost and failure rate / capex.

Doesn't look like they made the hardware more tolerant of temperature, rather they made it remove waste heat more quickly.

"NVIDIA’s thermal engineering team reworked how those components handle heat, designing cooling loops that simplify how liquid is routed to multiple high-power chips on the board using a single inlet and outlet, resulting in a cleaner tray-level cooling architecture"

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#142

Post by fwipsy »

My understanding is that datacenter water consumption is not really that big of a deal compared to other industries, and it's mostly inflated by people who are looking for a reason to criticize AI/datacenters. If Nvidia is hoping to placate those people, I predict it will not work.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#144

Post by frollogaston »

XorNot wrote: post #140
frollogaston wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closed-loop water cooling chips is nothing new. There are two separate water systems that often get conflated*. The loop warms up the water, which is recycled but first needs to be cooled externally somehow. Normally they use evaporative cooling towers that do use water, or chillers that don't use water but use more energy. But they're claiming they can get that water loop so much hotter than the outdoor environment…

Just because it's not new doesn't mean that it was available or that the engineering needed to bring it to mass market wasn't significant.

It was available, there are plenty of water-cooled datacenters already, or water-cooled racks fitted into existing sites. Nvidia improved the cooling efficiency though.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#145

Post by lstodd »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #110
TitaRusell wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is it. You can make really nice datacenters that are basically quiet and environmentally perfect. This was never in dispute. But that is not how corporations roll. They want the cheapest shit that they can get away with. No regulations only corruption. Which is middle of nowhere America.

And if they put them in the middle of nowhere, I don't see why there's a problem. What I don't understand is putting these things in populated areas.

Would you like to work in the middle of nowhere?

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#146

Post by lkbm »

eqvinox wrote: post #17
amluto wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual heating due to human energy use is not really a big deal except perhaps locally. Climate change is caused by changing how much heat the earth retains from the sun. Maybe if we stopped using fossil fuels and used immense amounts of nuclear power, we would care about the waste heat. But solar and wind power largely redirect energy flows. It’s kind of like how brine from desalination is not a global problem for t…

I was specifically talking about the local microclimate. cf. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/climate/data-centers-are-... It's not clear to me what changes are happening here. The siblings to your post seem to be indicating an overall improvement.

This is kinda debunked / obviously false. It's almost entirely a land use issue: a building will create a heat island. Data centers aren't using enough energy to make a significant difference.

More on it at [0], but it doesn't take anything beyond a basic energy calculation to know that 1GW of energy is not going to have a significant effect "6.2 miles away".

[0] https://andymasley.com/writing/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-...

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#147

Post by sheepscreek »

why_at wrote: post #72

Maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't understand what the innovation is here. I get that they're using liquid coolant at higher than usual temperatures, but why couldn't they do that before? Most of the comparison in the article is for air cooled datacenters but what about other liquid cooled ones? Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what te…

Speculating here - “effectively” cooling the CPU and GPU materially using this technique at datacenter scale may have never been done. Those things than run hot, easily crossing 100C. So the loop is doing a lot of work to keep them stable at 55C.

The innovation may be in the speed or volume flow of the coolant through different parts of the data centre to regulate the temperature. And of course, redesigning every component to be compatible with this fan-less design.

I think it’s only possibly because NVIDIA is much more vertically integrated than ever before.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#148

Post by AlotOfReading »

taneq wrote: post #125
AlotOfReading wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia's automotive and aerospace variants get ratings up to 85C, for comparison.

Don’t their consumer GPUs run at 85C core temp? Maybe not for as long though.

Temperature ratings are the allowed ambient temperature. The actual silicon will inevitably operate somewhat higher, because coolers are just moving heat down a temperature gradient.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#149

Post by mistercow »

toast0 wrote: post #121
why_at wrote: post #72

Maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't understand what the innovation is here. I get that they're using liquid coolant at higher than usual temperatures, but why couldn't they do that before? Most of the comparison in the article is for air cooled datacenters but what about other liquid cooled ones? Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what te…

> Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what temperature things need to run at, how much energy it will use, how much heat it all will produce, etc. It seemed like a pretty big deal ~ 2011 when big companies were running their (air cooled) datacenters closer to 95F (35C) vs the traditional 72F (22C). So jumping up a little more is maybe no…

And I think the answer to the "doing the math" question is, until you've actually collected the data, "what math?" Until someone actually puts a bunch of six-figure value hardware through its paces, pushes the previous limits, and sees what that does to its lifespan, there's nothing to meaningfully calculate.

Re: 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

#150

Post by emsign »

briandw wrote: post #134
emsign wrote: post #101

Greenwashing, that's all. This is not going to be the standard it's just a light house project to calm some nerves to keep on going.

It's a response to the FUD that is water usage in data centers. Data centers don't use a meaningful amount of water when compared to just about any other industrial application, or many recreational ones. Data centers used about 66 billion liters 2023. source: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1 Golf courses used 2 trillion liters in 2020. We won't even bring up almond production.

The issue is though data centers are being built in areas with scarce water resources and they get prioritized. They still use a lot of water.
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