> Surely in all the previous datacenters that have been designed there has been someone doing the math and determining what temperature things need to run at, how much energy it will use, how much heat it all will produce, etc.
It seemed like a pretty big deal ~ 2011 when big companies were running their (air cooled) datacenters closer to 95F (35C) vs the traditional 72F (22C). So jumping up a little more is maybe not super exciting, but it's still innovation.
And I think the answer to the "doing the math" question is, until you've actually collected the data, "what math?" Until someone actually puts a bunch of six-figure value hardware through its paces, pushes the previous limits, and sees what that does to its lifespan, there's nothing to meaningfully calculate.
And the fact that their system doesn't dump water. I think that is actually perhaps the bigger deal. Datacenters have been getting a lot of heat (pun intended) for using significant fresh water at the expense of local municipalities.
Closed-loop water cooling chips is nothing new. There are two separate water systems that often get conflated*. The loop warms up the water, which is recycled but first needs to be cooled externally somehow. Normally they use evaporative cooling towers that do use water, or chillers that don't use water but use more energy. But they're claiming they can get that water loop so much hotter than the outdoor environment that active cooling isn't needed. They attribute this to improving the chip-to-water interaction.
Even air-cooled datacenters work somewhat the same way, but instead of water to chips, it's air. The air goes into hot aisles then exchanges heat with water, after which, see above.
* Other datacenter marketing materials talk about how they have a "closed loop system that uses no water" and they do still use water in the evap towers. I was half expecting this article to be that again, glad it wasn't.
Just because it's not new doesn't mean that it was available or that the engineering needed to bring it to mass market wasn't significant.
It was available, there are plenty of water-cooled datacenters already, or water-cooled racks fitted into existing sites. Nvidia improved the cooling efficiency though.