Nvidia's 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

This opens up an interesting synergy: district heating. 45C is low but not unworkable for a district heating loop, and a data center might be able to make a nice pitch to a community if the data center offers to provide heat to a district heating system for free. This brings the value to the local community of a nearby datacenter up from near zero to potentially a few million dollars per year.

Summer is still an issue, but fun solutions are possible. With the right geology, I think it’s possible to heat an underground volume in the summer and recapture (some of) that heat in the winter. In many, many climates, annual heating costs are far higher than cooling costs, at least if people aren’t stupid with skylights. [0]

[0] As a back-of-the-envelope heuristic, heating or cooling load due to conduction and air exchange is proportional to the difference between indoor and outdoor temperature. Outdoor temperatures of -10F to 30F are not unusual in the winter and are 40-80F away from an indoor temp of 70F. But outdoor temperatures in these climates rarely exceed 95F and are mostly lower in the summer, so that’s 15-25F of cooling. And heat pumps are more efficient at smaller temperature differences.

Radiative heating is an entirely different story.

Claude write good.

Nvidia has so much money and they can’t afford to pay a human for a day of their time to write a blog post?

Heat exchange is used instead of refrigerating the coolant. Makes sense. How do they manage the indoor climate for the humans working there though? Eventually everything will be at 45C in the building, will it not?

On one hand: great!

On the other hand: the heat has to go somewhere. So… where? Datacenters already create a warm microclimate in their vicinity, is that getting even worse?

wasn't this announced at gtc in march?

[dead]