Nvidia's 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

Microsoft's already building data centers hooked up to district heating (Espoo and Kirkkonummi, Finland). Heatpumps are amazing.

(Seasonal heat storage is also a thing, Espoo's neighbours have tens of GWh of storage, with a new 90 GWh cavern in the works. Not sure if the systems are interlinked.)

Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating

European cities are doing it already.

> Claude write good.

> Nvidia has so much money and they can’t afford to pay a human for a day of their time to write a blog post?

The shareholders desperately need that money.

Their valuation is based on their software stacks’s ability to displace human labor, this is just them eating their dogfood.

I feel that the sad reality is that most blogs in the future will be addressed to AI and not humans, it's gonna be quite rare to read directly something as we will have built-in tools within browser and phone and OS and so-on that always rewrite on-demand based on current expertise, wanted tone and so-on. There is a recent study I believe that demonstrated that AIs digest better articles made by AI, which means that it might be just better to let AI write the articles so others AI have a better accuracy in digesting it (and incorporating it in their training data as well).

The same as technical docs for any codebase, humans will not read them anymore, only AIs which then translate it to human on-demand, it's already happening, I've worked recently with many new frameworks/codebases without even opening the doc (not even the Github page) and solely asking the agent to gather info for me about it.

PS: The reason I feel it will be this way is that it will allow to legitimatize mass data collection indirectly, instead of doing telemetry on page and software level, we will just send all the content automatically to some inference providers (probably provided for free by Google, MS and so-on)

How does that change the calculus for space datacenters? There is still no reasons or benefits to having them in space. You still have to rely solely on radiative cooling. That doesn’t solve any of the maintenance problems. Space datacenters is a really dumb and unrealistic idea Musk is talking about to hype his companies, it’s not meant to actually be done. Anything in space is more expensive and way harder to do, for a datacenter there is no benefit. We aren’t lacking places where to have them on earth

The heat exchange between that fluid and the ambient air isn't infinitely fast, if it's low enough they can just run "normal" A/C at low power for the humans. They just need to keep the heat in the fluid until it reaches… well… whatever heat dump there is. (cf. top-level post)

> Heat exchange is used instead of refrigerating the coolant.

There are some systems that pipe refrigerant around the building, but they’re relatively uncommon (VRF or variable refrigerant flow if you want more details).

Glycol and water is cheaper than refrigerant so there’s usually a chilled water loop that passes thru a heat exchanger that interfaces with a chiller (vapor compression refrigeration) to reject the heat from the chilled water loop.

This eliminates the need for evaporative cooling towers.

This approach appears to directly reduce energy use (that's what the articles says). The heat would still be going into the local environment, but if there is a reduction in energy use, there should be less of it.

Actual heating due to human energy use is not really a big deal except perhaps locally. Climate change is caused by changing how much heat the earth retains from the sun. Maybe if we stopped using fossil fuels and used immense amounts of nuclear power, we would care about the waste heat. But solar and wind power largely redirect energy flows.

It’s kind of like how brine from desalination is not a global problem for the oceans at all — all that matters is diluting it enough that it doesn’t poison the local ecosystem.

The temperature is independent of the actual heat flux. Also - a quick search suggests that at best the data center coolers run at COP of little more than 10. The inverse of that is the amount of heat wasted just on cooling. Having a system not relying on heat pumps would only make it better. A back of the envelope calculation based on PC AIOs suggests they would achieve a COP of 20 or more. A scaled up system would be more efficient than that, if not just for wider tubes.