The Less Water Data Centers Use, The More Power They Consume. Here’s Why

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: so here we can see all of the liquid cooling infrastructure for the grace blackwell rack inside this equinix data center in san jose california there are hundreds of server racks some executing massive ai compute tasks for the company's renting space here to run thousands of graphics and central processing units there are eight gpu racks in here and each rack has 72 gpus inside of it and all those chips get hot under heavy workloads server can boil your eggs they are [00:00:31] Speaker 2: like raining at 80 degree celsius the chips themselves would melt down if they weren't [00:00:38] Speaker 3: continuously cooled and keeping these chips cool requires a lot of water and power which is a major reason why there's a national backlash against ai data centers backlash against data centers growing [00:00:51] Speaker 4: across the country 71 of respondents said they would oppose the construction of a data center in [00:00:57] Speaker 5: their local area backlash is also growing around power water costs who pays local and state leaders are hitting pause on new projects the rate payers both electrical and water have seen their rates be shot up they don't want to have to pay for these data centers to be there the largest data centers can [00:01:14] Speaker 3: use up to 5 million gallons per day that's what a small town of up to 50 000 might use a few data [00:01:20] Speaker 2: centers are using that much water but most communities in the u.s don't have the infrastructure to support [00:01:26] Speaker 3: that demand but not all data centers and ways of keeping them cool are created equal these servers [00:01:32] Speaker 1: are liquid cooled and they close big system but liquid cooling is only the start of the water and power equation because the facility still has to get rid of the heat that's been absorbed by the liquid how a data center does that is what really determines consumption rates this closed loop system itself [00:01:48] Speaker 2: doesn't necessarily mean the data center doesn't use water how do we reject the heat from the close loop to the ambient environment that's where the water usage comes in from dry cooling to evaporative [00:01:59] Speaker 1: cooling towers and hybrid solutions in between we visited data centers around the country and ship plants that need even more water to find out how data centers really use water what liquid cooling looks like and where the companies running the biggest ai workloads have room to improve [00:02:23] Speaker 3: inside data centers with closed loop systems hyperscalers often label their cooling systems as using zero water for a majority of the year what they're not taking into account is once that heat is moved off the chip it has to get moved out of the building and that part takes water and power in fact saving water [00:02:41] Speaker 6: often means using more power for cooling there's no sort of silver bullet but at some point you need to eject that heat out to the atmosphere and that's where those trade-offs occur but inside the servers [00:02:53] Speaker 3: that zero water use is largely right once a closed loop system is filled up no more water is consumed in this part of the process keeping those chips inside the servers cool this is one of the 18 compute trays [00:03:06] Speaker 7: the gpus sit underneath these copper cold plates that have liquid running through them to remove the [00:03:14] Speaker 3: heat from the system this is amd's helios the only real competitor to nvidia's industry-leading racks vera rubin and grace blackwell and both companies designed their latest systems so they can be entirely [00:03:25] Speaker 7: liquid cooled this is a cooling distribution unit that takes chilled water in from the facility filters it pumps it and distributes it to all of the helios racks keeping them cool we're doing about 750 gallons per minute of chilled water but unlike some cooling systems this one is completely closed loop and so [00:03:46] Speaker 3: it's not a drain upon the resources the biggest advantage of liquid cooling however comes from just how quickly it can bring chip temperatures down so they can get back to work water is about 3 000 times [00:04:00] Speaker 6: more effective than air removing heat from the chips therefore you're able to increase the density in [00:04:06] Speaker 3: the same footprint there's giant gigawatt plus sites built to run ai workloads for single huge companies like spacex ai open ai google meta and amazon then there's co-location data centers like this one equinix a big beneficiary of the ai boom provides the building power network connections and cooling to companies renting space for their server racks like these nvidia blackwell racks owned by nvidia backed ai software startup alembic so we went to an equinix data center where these servers are running real workloads today to see how this looks when the systems are powered on so these white pipes that are [00:04:42] Speaker 8: coming in are coming from our facility so it's our chilled water infrastructure and then it goes across a heat exchanger plate so that's how we're able to maintain the temperature and flow of the stainless [00:04:53] Speaker 3: steel piping that's distributing to each of the racks this equinix data center in san jose is on a closed loop system but it does still consume water like many data center operators equinix doesn't disclose water consumption at individual sites like this in 2025 though all equinix operations consumed 1.2 billion gallons [00:05:12] Speaker 4: of water up 10 from 2024 we're in 77 metros and you know our entire global water footprint is the equivalent of about 16 18 hole golf courses in the southwestern united states one of the leading suppliers of liquid [00:05:30] Speaker 3: cooling equipment to giants like nvidia and amd is cool it all the coal plates the heat exchangers and the [00:05:37] Speaker 9: connecting tissue between them we've done that for for 25 years cool it was acquired by water treatment [00:05:43] Speaker 3: company eco lab for 4.75 billion in july as ai drives huge demand for an especially efficient system called direct to chip cooling direct to chip cooling uses a coolant that includes glycol to help stop corrosion freezing or biological growth inside the highly sensitive systems but it's still primarily made of water legacy data centers were often air cooled in which large noisy fans push cool air through heat [00:06:09] Speaker 2: exchangers to carry the heat away air code is for let's say cpu based servers cloud servers storage servers networking equipment they only need air code because their heat density is much lower than gpus and for gpus due to the high power density air code system is not enough they run at such a high [00:06:33] Speaker 6: wattage a high temperature you would need nearly hurricane force winds to actually cool them down if you were just using air which is why water is so effective [00:06:49] Speaker 3: still the sheer scale of this data center build out has many residents worried more than 2 000 new data centers are planned in communities all across the country on top of nearly 1400 already in operation in many places the water supply simply can't support up to 8 million daily gallons needed at peak times for a 1 gigawatt site like metas in lebanon indiana because in reality there's a big way water is still used even when it's a closed loop system that water has to get cooled back down using external cooling a separate step from closed loop systems inside the building and it turns out the less water you use for this the more power you need [00:07:27] Speaker 2: so let's talk about the options the simplest approach is just use the outside air and it works pretty well [00:07:34] Speaker 3: in the winter time when the air is cold using ambient air is indeed the least water intensive method known as dry cooling large fans blow air across heat exchangers using that outside air to cool it down those fans don't work so well when the outside temperature is high and that's when power hungry cooling units similar to household ac need to kick on that's a very power intensive process and that's [00:07:57] Speaker 2: exactly why we have power shortages in the summer because everybody else turns on their ac [00:08:04] Speaker 3: evaporative cooling is the most water intensive method because water is lost in evaporation the hot water circulates through cooling towers or over wet pads that are exposed to air and the portion that evaporates carries the heat away with it in between those two extremes hybrid methods are common as companies try to find a balance such as dry cooling in the colder months and evaporative cooling when it's hot outside or a fine mist of water is sprayed to cool the incoming air before it passes through the dry [00:08:32] Speaker 5: cooling system there are data centers in texas and in phoenix you know where's 100 degrees during the day they have the land to provide to the data centers but they really are not the environment the center [00:08:45] Speaker 3: should be in companies often build water treatment plants to help treat and recycle the necessary water like one promised by elon musk in memphis that's meant to turn treated municipal wastewater into cooling water for spacexai's colossus data centers while colossus one came online rapidly back in 2024 construction on the water treatment plant has stalled colossus is allocated up to 1.28 million gallons of water per day and reports indicate it uses an average of 800 000 gallons per day as more data centers turn to water efficient cooling methods more power is needed that's in addition to the power needed to run all the servers and equipment it's why new data centers will account for most of the projected increase in electricity demand over the next decade and why tech companies are building their own power plants which also use a lot of water at the end of the day cooling the massive projects needed to supply the ai boom currently requires either a large amount of water or power there are however companies working hard on ways to make it better one idea make the chips themselves [00:09:56] Speaker 10: run less hot we provided over 25 degrees celsius difference or 40 degrees celsius difference in the [00:10:04] Speaker 3: temperature i mean the thermal catalystics lakwan kim's south korean chip startup deepx makes a low power ai processor that runs so cool it doesn't even melt butter placed on top as shown in a demo filmed by deepx [00:10:18] Speaker 10: we gave the same air workload and then we just put the butter on them every chip mounted each butter except for the best chip hyundai moto group robotics lab has announced that this year their first commercialized [00:10:36] Speaker 3: robots will use our chips lower heat chips are also in the works at sk hynix the world's leading maker of high bandwidth memory crucial for ai its next generation i hbm is designed specifically to reduce heat [00:10:49] Speaker 11: generation which would lower the water or power needed for cooling we developed i hbm with ice technology ice stands for integrated cooling element and we can reduce the thermal resistance by 30 percent at cool it [00:11:05] Speaker 3: it's working on getting the liquid even closer to the chips there's some really cool instances of water [00:11:11] Speaker 9: almost in the chip or just on top of the chip that's all about being able to deliver even warmer water to the data center and continuing this this ride towards ever more efficient use of liquid cooling in [00:11:23] Speaker 3: data centers and at data centers like equinix efficient water use is crucial as ai workloads and [00:11:29] Speaker 6: business from customers continues to grow but equinix we take it very very seriously communities rightly have begun to ask the right questions data centers consume energy they consume resources like water but they also provide a very critical function to modern society [00:11:59] Speaker ?: Thank you.