Nvidia Claims Its New Server Design Is A Solution To AI’s Water Concerns

The surge in artificial intelligence usage has sparked concerns about the consumption of massive amounts of water required to keep the data centre cool. Tech giant Nvidia may have found a solution to that with its new server infrastructure.

The chipmaker announced that its newest AI servers will use liquid cooling entirely. The method eliminates the need for air-cooling fans that are dependent on water.

The servers will reduce heat using a liquid coolant made of propylene glycol and water that is recirculated in a closed loop. As per Nvidia, the system does not need to draw in new water.

 Ali Heydari, director of data centre cooling and infrastructure at Nvidia said, “The NVIDIA DSX reference design for AI factories has zero water consumption — we have eliminated massive amounts of power usage and pretty much all water usage. With dry-cooler-based designs, it's a closed-loop system with no evaporative water cooling — outside of maybe 1% of the year when we might need chillers in some climates.”

The bold claim by Nvidia adds that its coolant can work at temperatures of up to 45 °C, much higher than previous systems.

The Jensen Huang-led company estimates that a 50-megawatt hyperscale facility could reduce $4 million annually in cooling-related energy and water costs by shifting to liquid-cooled infrastructure. However, these systems are expensive.

Nvidia's announcement of moving towards a more energy-efficient system comes on the heels of a United Nations prediction earlier this month that AI-related water consumption could equal the yearly needs of 1.3 billion people by 2030.

Nvidia's system is not without flaws either. The main issue is how the chipmaker measures data centre water use, as per Tech Crunch. According to its blog post, Nvidia basically draws a line around the data centre. Anything inside the facility is counted, and anything outside is ignored.

Water use outside of a facility, used mostly in electricity generation and chip manufacturing, can double or even triple the total water footprint of a data centre. This means Nvidia's new server infrastructure addresses about a quarter to a third of the total water consumption of AI data centres.

Not just that, natural gas and coal are expected to provide over 40% of new electricity to meet data centre demand through 2030, as per the International Energy Agency. Fossil fuel plants remain one of the largest water users in the US, with a daily consumption of 2.7 billion gallons per day, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Nvidia's new solution may only address part of the problem.