When people start ranting about AI, you can be sure a few things are going to come up during the two-minutes hate: job loss, higher power bills, the neverending tide of low-effort slop, and wasting precious freshwater. Well, NVIDIA wants to take away that last one, beacause the all-water cooled Ruben architecture won’t need any evaporative cooling— coolant can stay in a closed loop, and never needs to be cooled below 45 C, or 113 F.
This sort of coolant loop should be familiar to anyone who has ever built a water-cooled PC or PlayStation: there’s a glycol-water mix, water blocks, and a radiator to reject heat to the environment. NVIDIA doesn’t mention if their new servers come with RGB lighting, but we’d like to imagine it’s an option. The big difference — aside from the rainbow LEDs– between a Ruben server and your old gaming rig is that in these racks, everything is on a waterblock. If there’s a chip on the motherboard generating heat, it’s getting rid of it into the same cooling water. Cooling water, that we have to emphasize, needs only be cooler than the chips themselves: in this case, they’re talking 45 C on the cold side, and 55 C headed out of the racks. (That’s 113 F to 131 F for all the bald eagles reading this.)
Given the required temperature drop is so modest, there’s no need for the evaporative chillers that have given AI data centers such a bad name in water conservation circles. Just like in a water-cooled PC, ambient-temperature air running over dry heat exchangers– also known as big honkin’ radiators–is able to handle the cooling, so no water is lost. Since everything is on waterblocks, there’s no need for cooling air, either, and the server farms need only be air conditioned to the degree required to make them comfortable to work in.
If you think NVIDIA is making this change because they suddenly care about water conservation, think again. The press release makes their motivations very clear: cooling costs money, and running this hot saves a lot of it. We’re talking four mil US a year for a 50 MW hyperscaler. One might suspect that this sort of thermal regime could limit the lifetime of the hard-working NPUs, but since they’ll be obsolete in a few years anyway, that’s not likely a big concern, especially not for NVIDIA.
We’ve actually seen hotter fluids used to cool computers before– coffee, for one. Water cooling also isn’t new in the data center world; we took a look at it a few years back. Things are clearly heating up now, though.
Recently [Bits und Bolts] found himself in a bit of a pickle, when on boot his PC would complain about a connected USB device drawing too much power, before shutting down again. After unplugging various USB devices, the problem was narrowed down to an Elgato Cam Link 4K video capture device.
