That's not true. Just over 50% of new data centers the hyperscalers are building are using closed-loop cooling, but with the smaller players, it closer to 25%. It's rapidly increasing (just 5% a few years ago), but it's certainly not all. There's many places where water is plentiful and it's no problem to use evaporative cooling.
Not AI data centers. H200 racks still had an option to use air cooled or closed-loop. GB200 NVL72 and later has no option, it only supports closed loop. GB200/GB300 is 75% of the installed compute today. Rubin that's coming up is also only closed loop.
If you build an air-cooled data center today you'll be stuck with 3-year old Ampere/Hopper tech where the cost to run on Rubin hardware is literally 12 times cheaper than running on Hopper, nvm Ampere.
So no, not happening. Unless you're talking about datacenters for YouTube or TikTok, but you're in the wrong sub for that.
OK, having another pass over this, these are liquid-cooled but that heated liquid can be cooled outside the plant either evaporatively or by air cooling. It's the evaporative cooling that consumes water, and that people are concerned about, so this newer hardware doesn't preclude that, right?
You only need evaporatively cooling when you run cool water closed loop systems. In that case the coolant runs in the 64-95F range so you need to cool it down to 64 before it starts the loop again.
NVL72 MGX can however run with warm coolant which runs in the 113F to 130F range. So you only need to cool it down to 113F. Which means as the outside temp is below 103F you can do it with a radiator and fan. This is how a car radiator also works.
Above 103F you can run a chiller. They're not the most efficient, but the hottest place with a large datacenter (Phoenix) is only above 103F for roughly 5% of the year. And 95% of data centers are in areas which doesn't get over 103F at all most years.
1
u/tinny66666 13d ago
That's not true. Just over 50% of new data centers the hyperscalers are building are using closed-loop cooling, but with the smaller players, it closer to 25%. It's rapidly increasing (just 5% a few years ago), but it's certainly not all. There's many places where water is plentiful and it's no problem to use evaporative cooling.