Nvidia says gaming PC cooling tech in their newest AI servers will fix water crisis - Here's how

Nvidia has unveiled a new liquid cooling system for its AI servers that the company says eliminates the need for water-hungry air-cooling fans, a development that could significantly reduce the environmental toll of the world's fast-growing data centres.

From contaminated wells to plummeting water pressure, communities living near data centres have borne a quiet but growing cost of the artificial intelligence boom. Heavy water consumption at these facilities has become one of the most pressing concerns for residents and environmentalists alike.

The scale of the problem is significant. The United Nations warned earlier this month that AI-related water consumption could equal the annual needs of 1.3 billion people by the end of the decade.

Now Nvidia believes it has a practical fix, and the underlying technology is simpler than it sounds.

Nvidia announced on Monday that its newest AI servers will run entirely on liquid cooling, doing away with the air-cooling fans that have traditionally driven water demand at large data centre facilities.

Instead of drawing in water from external sources, heat is dissipated using a liquid coolant made of water and propylene glycol that circulates in a closed loop. Because the system continuously recirculates the same coolant, it does not need to pull in new water.

"We have eliminated massive amounts of power usage and pretty much all water usage," said Ali Heydari, Nvidia's director of data centre cooling and infrastructure.

The system is also built to withstand higher operating temperatures than previous designs, remaining functional at up to 45 degrees Celsius, or 113 degrees Fahrenheit.

The 45-degree threshold matters more than it might initially appear, according to researchers who study data centre efficiency.

Andrew Chien, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago and director of the CERES Center for Unstoppable Computing, has spent the past decade studying how to make data centres more efficient and reduce their environmental footprint. He told Fortune, the industry standard cooling temperature is currently 30 degrees Celsius, which demands considerably more air conditioning to maintain.

"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," Chien said. “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. Because if it's cool enough outside, you don't need to.”

The physics behind this are straightforward. "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 said.

He added a note of caution on the claim of zero water use. "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," he told Fortune, while noting that eliminating water use entirely remains unrealistic. Liquid cooling will, however, substantially reduce how much water is needed.

Nvidia estimates that a 50-megawatt hyperscale facility could save more than four million dollars a year in cooling-related energy and water costs by making the switch to liquid-cooled infrastructure.

Nvidia is not the first major technology company to move in this direction. In August 2024, Microsoft announced that its new data centres would stop using water for cooling altogether, a shift the company said would save more than 125 million litres of water per year per facility.