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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

#21

Post by lrasinen »

amluto wrote: post #12

This opens up an interesting synergy: district heating. 45C is low but not unworkable for a district heating loop, and a data center might be able to make a nice pitch to a community if the data center offers to provide heat to a district heating system for free. This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year. Summer is still an issu…

Microsoft's already building data centers hooked up to district heating (Espoo and Kirkkonummi, Finland). Heatpumps are amazing.

(Seasonal heat storage is also a thing, Espoo's neighbours have tens of GWh of storage, with a new 90 GWh cavern in the works. Not sure if the systems are interlinked.)

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

#22

Post by mchusma »

This is also the type of thing that makes space based data centers more viable. I was previously more skeptical on the concept but have come around.

I do think ground based centers will have better economics when they can be built though, and this addresses noise and water complaints which are the big 2 regional complaints.

It seems like lots of bottlenecks are getting solved quickly, except for maybe memory.

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

#23

Post by skybrian »

ramon156 wrote: post #18
amluto wrote: post #12

This opens up an interesting synergy: district heating. 45C is low but not unworkable for a district heating loop, and a data center might be able to make a nice pitch to a community if the data center offers to provide heat to a district heating system for free. This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year. Summer is still an issu…

Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

It sounds like with this liquid cooling, they won’t need the fans?

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

#24

Post by xattt »

ramon156 wrote: post #18
amluto wrote: post #12

This opens up an interesting synergy: district heating. 45C is low but not unworkable for a district heating loop, and a data center might be able to make a nice pitch to a community if the data center offers to provide heat to a district heating system for free. This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year. Summer is still an issu…

Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

Noise is a design choice and could likely be legislated away. Reject heat is different than heating from greenhouse gas effects that are “heating the planet”.

No one bats an eye when an air conditioner runs.

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

#25

Post by dgellow »

xattt wrote: post #24
ramon156 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

Noise is a design choice and could likely be legislated away. Reject heat is different than heating from greenhouse gas effects that are “heating the planet”. No one bats an eye when an air conditioner runs.

> No one bats an eye when an air conditioner runs.

In the US

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

#26

Post by dgellow »

mchusma wrote: post #22

This is also the type of thing that makes space based data centers more viable. I was previously more skeptical on the concept but have come around. I do think ground based centers will have better economics when they can be built though, and this addresses noise and water complaints which are the big 2 regional complaints. It seems like lots of bottlenecks are getting solved quickly, except for maybe memory.

How does that change the calculus for space datacenters? There is still no reasons or benefits to having them in space. You still have to rely solely on radiative cooling. That doesn’t solve any of the maintenance problems. Space datacenters is a really dumb and unrealistic idea Musk is talking about to hype his companies, it’s not meant to actually be done. Anything in space is more expensive and way harder to do, for a datacenter there is no benefit. We aren’t lacking places where to have them on earth

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

#28

Post by amluto »

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.

Indeed. If the datacenter uses less total power, it produces less waste heat.

If you manage to use the waste heat to avoid generating heat somewhere else (that the article calls heat recovery) then there’s a further reduction in total heat output.

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

#29

Post by amluto »

ramon156 wrote: post #18
amluto wrote: post #12

This opens up an interesting synergy: district heating. 45C is low but not unworkable for a district heating loop, and a data center might be able to make a nice pitch to a community if the data center offers to provide heat to a district heating system for free. This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year. Summer is still an issu…

Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

I’ve been to datacenters, but not the huuuge ones people seem to talk about in the context of AI. They are noisy inside (due to air cooling, which is largely avoided by the tech in the OP), but they’re entirely unremarkable outside compared to any other commercial or industrial building. Computers are not inherently loud, nor is power conversion.

Power plants are all over, even in populated areas. They’re not so bad either (except perhaps coal).

There is no fundamental reason that datacenters need to be especially unpleasant to their neighbors.

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

#30

Post by battery_staple_ »

dgellow wrote: post #26
mchusma wrote: post #22

This is also the type of thing that makes space based data centers more viable. I was previously more skeptical on the concept but have come around. I do think ground based centers will have better economics when they can be built though, and this addresses noise and water complaints which are the big 2 regional complaints. It seems like lots of bottlenecks are getting solved quickly, except for maybe memory.

How does that change the calculus for space datacenters? There is still no reasons or benefits to having them in space. You still have to rely solely on radiative cooling. That doesn’t solve any of the maintenance problems. Space datacenters is a really dumb and unrealistic idea Musk is talking about to hype his companies, it’s not meant to actually be done. Anything in space is more expensive and way harder to do, f…

> How does that change the calculus

To be precise, heat rejection via radiative cooling scales with the fourth power of the temperature (in K) the radiator operates at, all else constant.

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