Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 450 posts

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

#281

Post by rytis »

sandworm101 wrote: post #259
FridgeSeal wrote: post #228

> In the right geography — somewhere with reliably cool outdoor air Aaahh, there’s the catch. “Save resources on cooling by building your data centre somewhere cold, and pollute the surrounding environment by dumping your waste heat wholesale into that!” Good job Nvidia, I almost thought we had something good there.

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?

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

#282

Post by [deleted] »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #228

> In the right geography — somewhere with reliably cool outdoor air Aaahh, there’s the catch. “Save resources on cooling by building your data centre somewhere cold, and pollute the surrounding environment by dumping your waste heat wholesale into that!” Good job Nvidia, I almost thought we had something good there.

[deleted]

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

#283

Post by [deleted] »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #276
DanielHB wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datacenter waste heat even a problem? I only ever heard of nuclear power plants waste heat being a problem when the cooling water is dumped directly into rivers (instead of the ocean).

Yes. The hot water the datacenters dump destroys local ecosystems.

[deleted]

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

#284

Post by ceejayoz »

sandworm101 wrote: post #259
FridgeSeal wrote: post #228

> In the right geography — somewhere with reliably cool outdoor air Aaahh, there’s the catch. “Save resources on cooling by building your data centre somewhere cold, and pollute the surrounding environment by dumping your waste heat wholesale into that!” Good job Nvidia, I almost thought we had something good there.

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.

We'll complain if it gives us an allergy to steak.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/06/as-lone-star-tick...

Or malaria.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03476-7

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

#285

Post by vlan0 »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #276
DanielHB wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datacenter waste heat even a problem? I only ever heard of nuclear power plants waste heat being a problem when the cooling water is dumped directly into rivers (instead of the ocean).

Yes. The hot water the datacenters dump destroys local ecosystems.

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

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

#286

Post by crunchiepooker »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #228

> In the right geography — somewhere with reliably cool outdoor air Aaahh, there’s the catch. “Save resources on cooling by building your data centre somewhere cold, and pollute the surrounding environment by dumping your waste heat wholesale into that!” Good job Nvidia, I almost thought we had something good there.

I’d love that heat in the winter. Imagine, free heat! Linus heats his pool with excess cpu heat. It’s all about using things wisely and not panicking. AI and datacenters are here to stay, you can’t fight them, but you can leverage their waste for profit.

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

#287

Post by dzhiurgis »

Version467 wrote: post #223
dzhiurgis wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im general. But the way AI is growing is not a general case, but exponential. It shouldn’t be slowed down by generalisations.

Surely there's something missing from your argument. It shouldn't be slowed down because it's growing exponentially? Presumably you think that the end result of extreme and rapid ai growth is beneficial to most and that is why it shouldn't be slowed down? That arriving earlier at whatever end-point you have in mind will provide so much benefit that it's worth disregarding the pains to get there? Or is there something…

I mean it's kinda obvious you don't wanna throw baby out of bath water when technology is at its infancy.

There's nearly 0 downsides to absolute majority of people to continue building out datacenters. Yet I see this derangement syndrome with headlines like "I’d Rather Risk Cancer Than See AI Move This Fast"[0]. This is just as farcical as calling cars a national security threat in 1920s and any sufficient army should be run by cavalry.

0: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/ai-cancer-pro...

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

#288

Post by boxed »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #276
DanielHB wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datacenter waste heat even a problem? I only ever heard of nuclear power plants waste heat being a problem when the cooling water is dumped directly into rivers (instead of the ocean).

Yes. The hot water the datacenters dump destroys local ecosystems.

Citation?

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

#289

Post by DanielHB »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #195
badpun wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European cities are doing it already.

Blew my mind living in a Berlin apartment, that the heating & hot water was managed centrally for the entire block (not the apartment block, the whole city block). Too used to Anglo cities where everyone does for themselves.

Blew my mind in stockholm that they have hot water at all. In my home country we just have electric heaters at the shower tap.

(seriously though, I knew they had hot water, it just never occurred to me how awesome it is to have hot water on the tap)

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

#290

Post by mschuster91 »

eru wrote: post #280
mschuster91 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recovery isn't the issue, the issue is that district heating systems are pretty much a rarity across the world for a number of reasons. Recovering waste heat - no matter if from datacenters, industrial processes or eve wastewater/sewage - is trivial, but getting the heat to somewhere it still can have a productive "secondary usage" is a massive and expensive problem.

Yes. There's eg combined power plants that use waste heat from power plants to heat houses. The problem is that this tends to make the power plants less efficient at electricity generation. So this waste heat recycling should only be done where and when it makes sense. (But that's pretty easy: absent any legal requirements, the involved parties have all the right incentives already. It's all internalised between the…

> The problem is that this tends to make the power plants less efficient at electricity generation.

Huh what? Never heard of that one before.

> absent any legal requirements, the involved parties have all the right incentives already

Well... that's the problem, they don't. Sure, datacenter operators could go and offer to install district heating, waste heat recyclers and whatnot, and it would likely be profitable. But, and here it gets annoying, it's not profitable enough.

Post reply on HN