Among Americans’ many concerns about data centers—from the constant humming sound to high electricity prices—heavy water consumption stands out. Residents of towns with data centers have reported contaminated water, low water pressure, and unauthorized siphoning, putting one of life’s essentials under threat.
Nvidia thinks it has the solution for that: its new server infrastructure.
The company announced on Monday that its newest AI servers will entirely use liquid cooling, a method that eliminates the need for air-cooling fans that rely on water.
Instead, heat will be dissipated by a liquid coolant made of water and propylene glycol that’s recirculated in a closed loop. The company says the system doesn’t need to draw in new water.
“We have eliminated massive amounts of power usage and pretty much all water usage,” Ali Heydari, Nvidia’s director of data center cooling and infrastructure, said in a statement.
In addition, the coolant can remain operational at temperatures of up to 45 °C or 113 °F, a much higher temperature than previous systems.
The move towards a more energy-efficient system comes as the United Nations predicted earlier this month that AI-related water consumption could equal the annual needs of 1.3 billion people by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, Nvidia is not the only company working towards significantly reducing its water consumption. In August 2024, Microsoft announced that its new data centers will stop using water for cooling, saving more than 125 million liters of water per year per data center.
“The thing that’s exciting about what Nvidia announced is it shows really what’s possible in terms of pushing up this liquid input temperature to 45°C,” said Andrew A. Chien, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. “It’s super important to push it up, because in many cases it allows you to do that cooling, that exhausting of heat to the outside environment without running HVAC units, without running air conditioners. Because if it’s cool enough outside, you don’t need to.”
Chien directs the CERES Center for Unstoppable Computing. For the past 10 years, the center has studied how to make data centers more efficient and reduce their negative environmental impacts. A higher cooling temperature goes against conventional wisdom, he explained. The industry standard is 30°C, which requires much more air conditioning to maintain.
“The reason that they want to do this is that if you can cool the chips at a higher temperature, it becomes easier to vent that heat into the outside environment, because it’s a higher temperature supply, and heat flows downhill,” Chien said.
While he said zero water use is unrealistic, liquid cooling will significantly reduce the need for water. The catch is that these systems are expensive.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment on the costs of the systems or if the company will be retrofitting existing data centers with the technology.
The company estimates that a 50-megawatt hyperscale facility could save over $4 million a year in cooling-related energy and water costs by moving to liquid-cooled infrastructure.
“It is a direction that more people should be trying to get to, because it’ll reduce the total power consumption of these large data centers,” Chien said.
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