As concerns grow over the environmental impact of AI data centers, Nvidia has introduced a new server infrastructure designed to significantly reduce water and energy consumption. The company announced that its latest AI servers will use a fully liquid-cooled design, removing the need for traditional air-cooling fans that depend on water.
“We have eliminated massive amounts of power usage and pretty much all water usage,” said Ali Heydari, Nvidia’s Director of Data Center Cooling and Infrastructure.
The new cooling system can operate at temperatures of up to 45°C (113°F), much higher than previous systems. This allows heat to be released more efficiently into the outside environment, reducing the need for HVAC systems and air conditioners.
The announcement comes as the United Nations recently projected that AI-related water consumption could equal the annual water needs of 1.3 billion people by the end of this decade.
Nvidia is not alone in working to reduce water usage in data centers. In August 2024, Microsoft announced that its new data centers would stop using water for cooling, with each facility expected to save more than 125 million liters of water annually.
“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,” said Andrew A. Chien, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. “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.”
Chien, who directs the CERES Center for Unstoppable Computing, said the industry standard cooling temperature is 30°C, making Nvidia’s higher operating temperature a significant shift. He added that while completely eliminating water use is unrealistic, liquid cooling can greatly reduce water consumption. However, he noted that these systems are expensive.
Nvidia has not commented on the cost of the new infrastructure or whether it plans to retrofit existing data centers. The company estimates that a 50-megawatt hyperscale facility could save more than $4 million annually in cooling-related energy and water costs by adopting liquid-cooled infrastructure.
“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,” Chien said.
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