Nvidia says its new data center design will fix AI’s water problem

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 con