Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.nvidia.com

381–390 of 450 posts

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

#381
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

30 minutes outside of the suburbs doesn't sound like an awful commute.

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

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't fight data centers, data centers won't seek solution oriented ways to lower their footprint. You are really saying that you can't fight data center demand. And that is true, but you can restrain their supply, increase their cost, and optimize on low impact approaches.

> If you don't fight data centers, data centers won't seek solution oriented ways to lower their footprint. You are really saying that you can't fight data center demand. And that is true, but you can restrain their supply, increase their cost, and optimize on low impact approaches. Not that this is an apples to apples comparison but imagine people saying that about nuclear reactors. Yes, we want them to be as safe a…

Nuclear and datacenter comparisons aren't the apples to apples type you're so fond of.

Any safety measure that requires the humans to do the right procedures the right way for 10^5 years is not safety.

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, that's why they want Greenland so bad. Low temperature, many free spaces, no significant nature and if there is one, not enough citizen who can complain. And if they still need water for cooling, there is probably enough from the melting ice they can use.

No, datacenters are placed near cities because the biggest concern is workforce.

How much workforce do you think it takes to run a data center?

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everyone will be living in the metaverse by 2025, you can't fight it so might as well buy virtual property near Snoop Dogg" It takes one recesssion and all datacenter spending will get rolled back. Yes technology will not go away, AI has been here for over many decades that doesn't mean the current paradigm will continue always and exactly the same forever into the future. If history shows us anything its that parad…

[flagged]

I wonder why dark fiber was so cheap in the early 2000s when google famously started using it to link their datacenters?

Not to mention that a huge percentage of the fiber laid in the 90s was never used. It was put in the wrong place or turned out to be the wrong type or was just lost when the "the internet is the future and will change everything. it runs over fiber and we'll need so much more than we could ever lay" companies went bust.

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

#385
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust me. In the depths of a northern winter, nobody will complain about "waste heat". Just ask the manetees that huddle near reactor outflows in florida.

But maybe we want northern winters to stay... northern winters?

[deleted]

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

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any references for this comment: '"water use" thing is a myth anyway'. I would like to show my kid who keeps complaining to me about AI water usage.

how does this square against georgia just ignoring it draining the water supply, https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-center... and reports of undrinkable water due to the ai center construction? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o even in the article you linked, it admits AI data centers CAN harm water supplies "Individual data centers can sometimes stress local water systems in the way o…

That Politico article is a good example of the kind of misinformation that makes the water consumption concern a myth. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/2053296197679374365

> What actually happened here was that [...] two water hookups at a data center construction site weren't properly registered or linked to a billable account. When the utility noticed the problem, they sent the data center a retroactive bill for all the water, for $147,474 covering ~29M gallons. The data center paid it.

> Did the data center cause the low water pressure? The article very strongly implies a connection, but doesn't give the reader the right numbers to judge whether this actually happened. To figure this out, we need to know over what time the 30 million gallons was drawn [...] That's about 1% of the county's daily water output. There are a ton of ways a water system like this can experience low water pressure, and a 1% dip just isn't one of them.

> [...] the complaint about low water pressure [which led to discovering the billing problem] was coming from a private well that the data center didn't even draw from

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

#387
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that should be handled by local authorities raising water prices to account for that - preferably to above the cost it would take them to build up the needed water augmentation - rather than as a worldwide environmental concern.

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

#388

> and the same liquid can be recirculated in a closed loop so no new water is consumed to cool the chips That doesn't mean a datacenter doesn't have a very high _initial_ need for water, or to replace _some_ amount of leakage, replacement etc (agreed it will be way lower than say a swamp cooler). For example, they could be using millions of gallons as a sort of "ballast" to keep the water temperature very stable in t…

The entire room wouldn't be 45˚C, or even the entire machine, just the liquid-cooled components.

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

#389

Claude write good. Nvidia has so much money and they can’t afford to pay a human for a day of their time to write a blog post?

> Claude write good. > Nvidia has so much money and they can’t afford to pay a human for a day of their time to write a blog post? The shareholders desperately need that money.

You make it sound silly, but yes, as a (very small) shareholder of NVDA, I would indeed prefer that they use Claude to write blog posts rather than hiring a dedicated person to do that with "marketing flair". Better yet, I would prefer that they just publish the prompt with the actual update details and I'll take it from there.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI and datacenters are here to stay, you can’t fight them, Maybe you can't (or don't want to), but people can absolutely fight data center construction. Your lack of imagination doesn't bind others.

But why? I want cheap tokens. Build a data center on every block (or more realistically in all the empty space we have everywhere).

Unironic Paperclip Maximalism. Huh.

I propose that you don’t actually want cheap tokens. You want cheap tokens in service of some other goals. Are they worth the environmental cost?

Post reply on HN