SHERMAN, TEXAS — Nvidia announced that its newest AI servers will incorporate liquid cooling. This method aims to eliminate on-site water usage and reduce power consumption in data centers.

The liquid cooling system dissipates heat using a coolant made of water and propylene glycol, which recirculates in a closed loop. Nvidia stated this system does not require drawing in new water. Ali Heydari, director of data center cooling and infrastructure at Nvidia, said, "We have eliminated massive amounts of power usage and pretty much all water usage."

The coolant can operate at temperatures up to 45 °C (113 °F). The new system pumps coolant into racks at this temperature, and it emerges at 55 °C (131 °F) after passing through a server. Nvidia estimates that a 50-megawatt hyperscale facility could save over $4 million annually in cooling-related energy and water costs by transitioning to liquid-cooled infrastructure.

Andrew A. Chien, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, commented on the high operating temperature. He said, "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." He added, "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." He also said, "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 concluded, "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."

The industry standard cooling temperature is 30°C. Josh Parker, chief sustainability officer at Nvidia, stated, "The water consumption challenge for data centers is largely solved." Nvidia's system measures water use by counting consumption within the facility, but water use outside the data center, such as in electricity generation and chip manufacturing, can increase a facility's total water footprint. Nvidia's solution addresses approximately one-quarter to one-third of AI data centers' total water consumption.

The United Nations predicted that AI-related water consumption could equal the annual needs of 1.3 billion people by the end of the decade. Fossil fuel power plants, which collectively generate about half of all data center power today, use large amounts of water. For example, natural gas power plants use 1.17 liters of water for every kilowatt-hour of electricity, while coal plants use 2.2 liters per kilowatt-hour. The IEA projects that natural gas and coal will provide over 40% of new electricity for data centers through 2030.