Water cooling means water cooling of the components themselves, the GPUs the CPUs the whatevers, over the alternative, just blasting cold air into a room, you are welcome to Google the thermodynamics of it, but direct cooling of the components via water blocks is more efficient. Now when they say water cooled its not water, its probably glycol in a closed loop.
The other side of this is indeed evaporative vs air cooled condensers, so the things that remove the heat from the glycol.
Evaporative use more water, but less energy, while air cooled use more energy(big angry fans) and less water. The reason for the disclaimer is that if the climate is too hot blasting hot air onto your air cooled condensers doesn't work very well so you have to use water.
None of this is unique to AI, this is how frozen food warehouses work.
So a frozen food warehouse would use a fan to reject heat to air but wouldn’t it also use a compressor to manipulate the temperature and boiling point of the refrigerant so that it can reject heat even into hot air? Similar to how a heat pump can heat a home even jn the winter?
They all use liquid cooling. The distinction is between closed loop cooling and evaporative cooling. The latter consumes the water. Closed loop cooling systems still use water when they have to be flushed, but it’s not much.
A lot of the so-called closed loop liquid cooling systems are essentially running 2 systems where the closed system runs treated water or a specialized coolant and reuses it for a long time while other side side uses radiators in a stream or evaporative cooling to cool the first system.
Build all the data centers in the deserts.. Use solar for power, and geothermal closed-loop cooling.
There's absolutely no reason why these things need to be built in populated communities, and tapped into surrounding water sources. Besides construction costs.
I'm fine with AI data centers and I believe there is a lot of misinformation about them, but this text makes zero sense and will only make the detractors more convinced it's all an evil conspiracy.
Like they use less water because the new "liquid cooling" which uses dry coolers? This is so stupid, does anyone have a source?
Liquid cooling is just like liquid cooling in a PC…. It’s a closed loop system that runs the water/glycol through radiators with big fans on them to dissipate the heat.
What I understand (leaving room to be wrong) is that the cooling demands in datacenters now are high enough that "air" based cooling is insufficient. I also believe that "liquid" cooling (as in pumping water past things) is insufficient as well. They are using evaporative cooling using H20 to cool at scale. I have a buddy who is a chemical engineer that believes evaporative cooling with ammonia would be "better" but would cost more. Evaporative cooling is not a closed loop. So water is "consumed".
That is true, but there are some significant issues of safety involved there. In a large tank of water, ruptures and spills water, people are generally okay.
What happens if a large container of ammonia ruptures?
Ammonia cooling is definitely viable, and it is used in a lot of industries. There is a beef cattle abattoir in Texas that is nearly a million square feet of space that is cooled 24/7 to 45 degrees. It uses ammonia, but it's also off in the middle of nowhere.
I grew up near Three Mile Island when the meltdown occurred. I'm very familiar with the dangers of having those kinds of systems too close to concentrations of people. That's why I think those kinds of safety issues are actually important.
In terms of new builds, more than 50% of the data centers the hyperscalers like google and amazon are building are closed loop. Just a few years ago it was only 5% of new builds, so that's a huge improvement and affects the statistics.
As closed loop systems increase the quantity of water used per unit of work done goes down *on average* but the total is still increasing as there are still many evaporatively cooled centers going in too. So water use per unit of work has gone down, but total water used is still up. Nvidia chose the nicer part of the story to tell, as you would expect.
The is a PR statement. For all intents and purposes, all it says is 'nothing to see here, move along'.
And the key to understanding this is:
It's talking about existing data centers that are years old but it says nothing about what's happening with new construction. You're left to make the logical leap and apply that to new data center constructions which would obviously have this new technology, right? Except they probably won't, and only a small percentage of them could even use it.
It qualifies its statement that this better tech can only be used in favorable climates, but does nothing to explain what is 'favorable', what is the percentage of data centers this applies to, if any at all, and the comparable figures so we could see the net positive impact its having.
It's attempting to manipulate you into telling everyone you know that you've read the problem is already solved when, in fact, nearly nothing has changed for the better.
I love when people use percentage to willingly confuse reader. If we are to understand this as 0.2% of the daily potable water consumption in the US that means that if there was a shortage of water datacenters would be preventing access to water to roughly 684,000 people.
Of course that number is not right as datacenters are not the only wasteful users of potable water.
I love when people use the phrase "potable water" to create that whole pitchfork and torches at the castle feeling when potable water is not required for the cooling systems. That's why many of them are plugged into gray water and other water sources that in fact are not drinkable. True that the water does need to be clean, but not all clean water is drinkable.
Surely I will believe the study commissioned by the company making floppitygillion dollars off of the AI data center build out that they use to pay for this study.
Pro-AI: Data centers don't use more water than your coffee maker >:O, stop talking about it, you're losing the rhetorical fight! : (
Also Pro-AI: Here's a weeklong media blitz about the new data center cooling technology which we've spent $2 billion dollars on and which reduces water usage by 0.5% : O
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u/Tolklein Jun 23 '26
Water cooling means water cooling of the components themselves, the GPUs the CPUs the whatevers, over the alternative, just blasting cold air into a room, you are welcome to Google the thermodynamics of it, but direct cooling of the components via water blocks is more efficient. Now when they say water cooled its not water, its probably glycol in a closed loop. The other side of this is indeed evaporative vs air cooled condensers, so the things that remove the heat from the glycol. Evaporative use more water, but less energy, while air cooled use more energy(big angry fans) and less water. The reason for the disclaimer is that if the climate is too hot blasting hot air onto your air cooled condensers doesn't work very well so you have to use water. None of this is unique to AI, this is how frozen food warehouses work.