Google's Liquid Cooling

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.

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.

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.

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.

To be clear all talk of water usage has been focusing on local usage which isn't well represented by national numbers.