Liquid Cooling Exhibits

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

ryandotsmith

43 points

8 comments

chipsandcheese.comTechstory

calmpositive

Debate

20/100

Liquid CoolingDatacenter CoolingAI Infrastructure

Key topics

Liquid Cooling

Datacenter Cooling

AI Infrastructure

The article showcases innovative liquid cooling exhibits at Hot Chips, sparking discussion on their potential to address water usage and leakage concerns in AI infrastructure.

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01Story posted
Sep 1, 2025 at 2:39 PM EDT
4 months ago
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02First comment
Sep 5, 2025 at 10:04 AM EDT
4d after posting
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3 comments in 84-96h
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04Latest activity
Sep 9, 2025 at 1:32 PM EDT
4 months ago
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Discussion (8 comments)

Showing 8 comments

ForOldHack

4 months ago

2 replies

These are some very innovative ideas and they totally and completely side step the need of AI for fresh water, leakages and alternative coolants.

sniffers

4 months ago

2 replies

They definitely don't. The water consumption of AI is not happening in the cooling blocks in the racks, it's happening outside in cooling towers. The heat a data center produces must be removed from the data center, and that is typically done via evaporation. The hot water interfaces with evaporative cooling towers and moves back inside to cool the chips again.

It would be neat if we could harvest that heat and use it for some purpose, but today we largely use it to make steam.

owenversteeg

4 months ago

1 reply

The issue with harvesting the waste heat is the temperature of it (low.) I commented about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007358

sniffers

4 months ago

Totally. I'm imagining something like heating for residential or greenhouses. Or a preheated input to some other heating process. One could presumably also spend energy to concentrate it a bit, but it's never going to turn turbines.

Still, the mind wonders -- here's a pocket of relatively warm, surely we could do something with that waste?

matt-p

4 months ago

It can be done without water it's just marginally more energy intensive. Traditional dry coolers are perfect for these temps.

quickthrowman

4 months ago

1 reply

No they don’t, if you remove evaporative cooling and go to a closed loop system, the coefficient of performance is almost cut in half. The people building data centers will almost invariably choose evaporative cooling because opex is substantially cheaper.

nomel

4 months ago

1 reply

Why is this downvoted? It's a simple fact of physics that's been fully understood for literal centuries, taught in high school [1]. For a given heat exchanger size, evaporative cooling will always win (well, unless it's raining), with drastically lower thermal resistance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capacity

quickthrowman

4 months ago

I assume people get upset when they’re told they are wrong, I don’t take it personally.

Thanks for seconding me :)

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