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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

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we want to understand what impact it is? Residential house emit heat too, but - most of the time - we don't consider them "destroys local ecosystems".. Maybe they do, but we don't treat them as a boolean thing, we try to understand the impact...

> Residential house emit heat too You are missing the context of the ecosystem - the topic is water ways. Homes aren't raising the temperature of local waterways which can wipe out entire fish and other aquatic populations while encouraging growth of oxygen depleting organisms and algae. Instead of a river or stream you have a dead stinking waterway.

> You are missing the context of the ecosystem

That's one of several reasons why a citation is warranted.

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

#392

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).

Your backyard first.

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xAI colossus was built without sufficient grid power, so uses "mobile" gas turbines to generate power. It's absurd, and serves as evidence that we need a confiscatory wealth tax, if we want to maintain a society.

For me, it is evidence that our ability to build new power stations has seriously eroded, mostly due to bureaucracy, and that we need to fix this if we want to maintain competitiveness. Consider the following graph which shows the power generation capabilities of China vs. the US during the last 40 years. https://www.notboring.co/p/the-electric-slide?utm_source=sub... The fact that data centers need to resort to gas…

There is power available in the country. It is not available in arbitrary quantity, to arbitrarily selected buildings, on arbitrarily short timelines.

That said, I agree we need more power generation in this country. Massive rollouts (like in China) would bolster industry while being beneficial to nearly every citizen except those dependent on legacy energy technologies.

Sadly, the party in power opposes the most scalable approaches to this because greatly expanded power generation would hurt margins for a few special interests.

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

#394

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).

dyauspitr, please respond. I'm trying to contact you about building a data center next to your home, or in your basement, or in your closet. I'll set it up for you. Please respond.

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

#395
Water use isn't a myth.

Our data center is mostly air-cooled, with 100F hot aisles and chilled water going to heat exchangers in every third rack position, although some of our newer GPU racks use chilled water directly. For most of the year that means we don't need chillers - the warm water return is sufficiently hotter than outdoor temp that heat "flows downhill" with a bit of pumping.

But we use an evaporative cooler to carry that heat away outside, because it's more efficient. If you look up the heat of vaporization of water, that means we evaporate about 10,000 gallons of water per day per megawatt of power dissipated. We're on canal off a large river, and we don't dissipate all that many megawatts, so I believe the water use isn't significant.

Using air as the working fluid to draw heat from your machines has a limitation - humans have to breathe that air whenever they work on the equipment, so the temperature is limited. Once the exterior temperature nears your hot aisle air temp, you either need active A/C to create a heat source hotter than ambient, or an evaporative cooler to lower the "effective" ambient temp to the dew point.

Liquid cooling lets you run your working fluid a lot hotter without killing folks like me who go into the data center, although honestly 45C sounds like an incremental improvement over the 100F places like ours are already running. (although to be fair, the warm water return from the heat exchangers is no doubt somewhat less than 100F) It also lets you run your "cold" side a lot hotter - if you "chill" your water down to 100F (38C) on a hot day, it's still cold enough to carry away a lot of heat at 45C.

(I'm skipping over the fact that there are multiple heat exchanger loops involved - e.g. any system with an evaporative cooler needs a heat exchanger to keep leaves and bird shit outside the building where it belongs)

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

#396

    Historically, cooling alone has accounted for up to 40% of a data center’s electricity consumption
The key word here is "historically". Modern data centers typically have a PUE lower than 1.2, with the .2 including not only energy spent on cooling but power distribution losses as well.

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

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a citation be needed?

Actually yeah, data centers using evaporative cooling shouldn't be causing more waste heat problems than most types of heavy industry. Heck, I would guess that even if datacenters dumping hot water on rivers it shouldn't have much of an impact unless the river is very small. Shouldn't spread misinformation when there are plenty of other valid points about datacenters.

There aren't many heavy industries that dissipate 100MW of thermal energy, never mind a GW.

Those that do - power generating facilities, large smelters, etc. - have very significant environmental footprints.

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

#398
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting...I don't think I've seen the data to support this

Probably not an accident; see Kim. Data Center Cooling Water Discharge: Assessing Environmental Transparency and Information Gaps, 32 Hastings Envt'l L.J. 177 (2026) But the work is out there, for instance Miara et al. Thermal pollution impacts on rivers and power supply in the Mississippi River watershed, Environ. Res. Lett. 13 034033 (2018) Worthington et al. The effects of a thermal discharge on the macroinvertebr…

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

#399

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.

Then ask for legislation that they have to be powered by solar power+batteries or something

Simple community objections should be sufficient to legislate change. Right now we see pride and ignorance from data centers to community concerns.

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

#400
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting...I don't think I've seen the data to support this

Probably not an accident; see Kim. Data Center Cooling Water Discharge: Assessing Environmental Transparency and Information Gaps, 32 Hastings Envt'l L.J. 177 (2026) But the work is out there, for instance Miara et al. Thermal pollution impacts on rivers and power supply in the Mississippi River watershed, Environ. Res. Lett. 13 034033 (2018) Worthington et al. The effects of a thermal discharge on the macroinvertebr…

Mmm yeah...just straight releasing the water isn't ideal. But of course, it's free! And that's what society optimizes for, sadly.
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