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Public pushback against data centers has emphasized their water and energy consumption<\/a>, and now Nvidia is highlighting<\/a> its claim that the Rubin generation reference design for a fully liquid-cooled data center has \u201celiminated massive amounts of power usage and pretty much all water usage.\u201d Still, it doesn\u2019t address all of the concerns around AI data centers, including during their construction, and for the power generation requirements<\/a> of the massive facilities. Also, as Gizmodo<\/em><\/a> points out, Nvidia\u2019s blog post doesn\u2019t mention the cost of building this style of data center vs. one using less efficient air cooling, but claims that \u201cevery cloud provider and data center operator building for [Rubin] is making the transition.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The efficiency gains are partly due to running AI servers hotter, as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius). In a recent report, Amazon similarly touted<\/a> higher heat tolerances as part of making its mostly air-cooled data centers more efficient.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n With Nvidia\u2019s system, \u201cheat is captured directly at the chip and transported through liquid loops operating at much higher temperatures, allowing outdoor dry coolers to reject heat efficiently for much of the year,\u201d with much more flexibility when it comes to the ambient air temperature.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n According to Nvidia\u2019s head of sustainability, Josh Parker, the reference design takes water use \u201cfrom roughly 2.6 million gallons per megawatt per year for conventional cooling-tower-based systems to near zero \u2014 up to a 100 percent reduction.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n