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Google's Liquid Cooling

(chipsandcheese.com)
399 points giuliomagnifico | 9 comments | 25 Aug 25 17:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.047s | source | bottom
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jonathaneunice ◴[25 Aug 25 18:58 UTC] No.45017586[source]▶
It’s very odd when mainframes (S/3x0, Cray, yadda yadda) have been extensively water-cooled for over 50 years, and super-dense HPC data centers have used liquid cooling for at least 20, to hear Google-scale data center design compared to PC hobbyist rigs. Selective amnesia + laughably off-target point of comparison.
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spankalee ◴[25 Aug 25 19:10 UTC] No.45017716[source]▶
From the article:

> Liquid cooling is a familiar concept to PC enthusiasts, and has a long history in enterprise compute as well.

And the trend in data centers was to move towards more passive cooling at the individual servers and hotter operating temperatures for a while. This is interesting because it reverses that trend a lot, and possibly because of the per-row cooling.

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1. echelon ◴[25 Aug 25 19:36 UTC] No.45018019[source]▶
This abundance of marketing (not necessarily this blog post) is happening because of all the environmental chatter about AI and data centers recently.

Google wants you to know it recycles its water. It's free points.

Edit: to clarify, normal social media is being flooded with stories about AI energy and water usage. Google isn't greenwashing, they're simply showing how things work and getting good press for something they already do.

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2. mlyle ◴[25 Aug 25 19:39 UTC] No.45018058[source]▶
Google uses plenty of water in cooling towers and chillers. Sure, water cooling loops to the server may reduce the amount a little bit compared to fans, but this isn't "recycling" in any normal sense.

It's mostly a play for density.

3. Legend2440 ◴[25 Aug 25 19:43 UTC] No.45018108[source]▶
The environmental impact of water usage seems way overblown to me.

Last year, U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons of water. Which sounds like a lot, but the US as a whole uses 300 billion gallons of water every day. Water is not a scarce resource in much of the country.

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4. foota ◴[25 Aug 25 19:59 UTC] No.45018288[source]▶
Personally, I agree. That said, I think it might be worth considering the impact of water usage in local areas that are relatively water constrained.
5. Guvante ◴[25 Aug 25 20:14 UTC] No.45018440[source]▶
To be clear all talk of water usage has been focusing on local usage which isn't well represented by national numbers.
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6. ◴[25 Aug 25 20:20 UTC] No.45018516[source]▶
7. quickthrowman ◴[25 Aug 25 21:45 UTC] No.45019431[source]▶
Google almost certainly uses evaporative cooling towers, it’s almost twice as efficient as air cooled chillers by themselves.
8. abdullahkhalids ◴[25 Aug 25 22:19 UTC] No.45019815{3}[source]▶
Yeah. There are metrics for how water stressed a community is. We know where data centers have been built, and we know how these water metrics have changed over time.

The correct metric is something like, what's the probability that the launch of data center in a location results in nearby communities to drop significantly in these water metrics.

9. bee_rider ◴[26 Aug 25 04:38 UTC] No.45022335[source]▶
It seems like a very minor problem next to the huge super obvious one, electricity use.