Nvidia wants to cut data center water use, but that’s not the same as fixing AI’s water problem
Nvidia just announced a warm-water cooling system that it says can dramatically reduce the amount of water a data center uses — eliminating “pretty much all water usage” inside the data center itself, according to an Nvidia executive in a press release.
“The water consumption challenge for data centers is largely solved,” Josh Parker, chief sustainability officer at Nvidia, recently told Axios.
But that’s only part of the water story. As long as AI data centers run on fossil fuels — a choice tech companies are increasingly making — the savings stop at the data center’s walls.
The core issue is how Nvidia measures data center water use. According to its blog post, the company essentially draws a line around the data center. Anything inside gets counted, anything outside gets ignored.
To be fair, Nvidia’s system does appear to deliver on its facility-level promise — the coolant runs in...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to techcrunch.com. To see the full text click HERE
