AI Summary
5 min readThe truth about data center water usage
A single rack of Nvidia's NVL72 GPUs draws 220 kilowatts. That's more than double the 80-kilowatt ceiling where even advanced air cooling with rear-door heat exchangers starts to break down. And 220 kilowatts is not the limit — Dell is installing a cluster at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs pushing roughly 280 kilowatts per rack, and engineers have mapped out designs up to 400 or 500 kilowatts. The reason for this density isn't spectacle: it's networking latency. GPUs need to talk to every other GPU in the data center as fast as possible, which means packing them onto the same motherboard, in the same rack, with high-speed interconnects. And every generation of chip runs hotter than the last, in some cases limited only by how fast the heat can be removed.
That heat removal problem is what drives the conversation about water. But as Tim Shedd, founder of Aboolean Insights and a longtime thermal engineer, explains, the relationship between cooling architecture and total water consumption is surprisingly indirect. The water that makes headlines — the 150 million gallons per year for a 300-megawatt data center with evaporative cooling — is mostly a legacy of older design choices, not a fixed requirement of modern data centers.
How cooling works inside a data center
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Tim Shedd**
- 2 (03:41) **What Needs Cooling in a Data Center and Why**
- 3 (08:28) **Historical Cooling Methods: From Air to Rear-Door Heat Exchangers**
- 4 (11:43) **The Shift to Liquid Cooling and Modern Rack Densities**
- 5 (13:43) **Mechanisms of Direct Liquid Cooling**
- 6 (17:39) **Liquid Cooling Architectures: Direct-to-Chip, Immersion, and Two-Phase**
- 7 (25:51) **Connecting Cooling Architecture to Data Center Water Consumption**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Of all the concerns surrounding the AI boom, data center water usage tops the list. Opponents claim that massive hyperscaler facilities threaten local drinking supplies and drain aquifers. Proponents say data centers use a negligible amount of water, at least compared to agriculture or conventional power generation sources.
So who actually has it right?
In this episode, Shayle sits down with Tim Shedd, founder of Ebullient Insights and an expert in data center thermal management. They unpack the history and evolution of data center cooling and consider how high-density chip racks have developers ditching air cooling in favor of single-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling. The two also discuss:
- Why modern GPU racks (drawing 220 kW to 500 kW+) have rendered traditional air cooling obsolete
- The distinctions between single-phase direct-to-chip, two-phase cooling, and immersion cooling methods
- How collecting heat at higher temperatures inside a server allows data centers to reject heat outside with far less energy and water inputs
- How developers can better communicate with the public about data centers’ water usage and foster local trust amidst rapid buildouts.
- Catalyst: What comes after the data center backlash?
- Open Circuit: Can data centers regain their social license?
- Open Circuit: A feast of hot takes
- Latitude Media: Data centers' hidden water footprint is linked to the grid
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
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