Three data centers squatting alongside the cruise ships and freighters in the French Mediterranean port of Marseille are testing water-saving cooling methods by pumping out an old coal mine.
Efforts like these are under the spotlight as generative artificial intelligence (AI) consumes growing volumes of water, one of the environmental priorities for the global AI summit in Paris this month.
The portside data centers “pump water at a rate of about 3,000 cubic meters per hour,” said Fabrice Coquio, president of their operator Digital Realty’s French business.
Photo: AFP
Water keeping the banks of servers at optimal temperature is “unfit for human consumption ... laden with minerals and particles,” Coquio said.
Digital Realty counts major platforms, from Microsoft to Disney and TikTok, among clients for its processing and storage.
In the past few months the Marseille site has seen installation of a supercomputer powering AI start-up Sesterce’s operations.
Photo: AFP
Every door on the heavily secured site is opened by fingerprint scanner.
Available year-round at a steady 14°C, the coal mine water enters the server rooms’ heat exchangers in a closed-loop system dubbed “river cooling.”
The data center’s machines must be kept at 25°C and with atmospheric humidity of 60 to 80 percent for top performance, Coquio said.
“If the cooling system stops, any computer room will climb to 45°C within 10 minutes,” potentially halting work, he said. “Cold is just as vital as the electrical socket powering the machines.”
Digital Realty says its river cooling has all but eliminated the need for energy-hungry air conditioning, lowering the three data centers’ consumption by 20 percent.
Exploiting such savings will be vital if use of generative AI and its attendant infrastructure grows in line with forecasts.
“The electrical densities our clients are asking for are in a different class than what we’ve been doing for the last 25 years,” Coquio said.
AI chips tend to be more powerful, consuming more energy and producing more heat than traditional processors.
Chipmaker Nvidia’s latest hardware is like a “radiator,” clocking in at “several hundred watts” of power usage, said Jacques Sainte-Marie, director of the environment program at France’s INRIA computing research institute.
To cool all these chips, many data centers still turn to air-conditioning or a water-evaporation system known as adiabatic cooling, in use at Microsoft among others.
Water usage is a major environmental challenge for the AI sector, alongside consumption of power and raw materials.
Google’s data centers used 14 percent more water in 2023 than the year before to reach 24 million cubic meters — enough to fill 9,600 Olympic swimming pools to a depth of 2m — while Microsoft’s surged 22 percent.
Alternative cooling methods include ambient air cooling, used by Microsoft in northern Europe and by Digital Realty, French operator Data4 and others.
“Our water strategy is localized and specific to the areas that we operate in, because there’s different requirements” depending on the site, said Alistair Speirs, infrastructure chief at Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing arm.
Microsoft is even experimenting with immersing computer components in a coolant that carries heat away, but does not damage the parts as water would.
It is not deploying the method widely because “the chemicals that exist to do this right now generally have a high PFAS quotient,” Speirs said, referring to so-called “forever chemicals” that have made headlines as widespread pollutants.
However, even methods touted as green alternatives can meet resistance.
In Marseille, the city government and a local campaign group have blasted Digital Realty for monopolizing water that they say could be used in other ways.
The water “can’t be drunk directly, but it could be used to relaunch local agriculture projects, clean streets, water parks,” campaigner Antoine Devillet said.
While data center cooling is getting better, companies could still use that for “greenwashing,” Devillet said. “You have to look at the whole production chain, from ores to chips, with huge consumption of electricity, water and sometimes rare raw materials at each step.”
Three experts in the high technology industry have said that US President Donald Trump’s pledge to impose higher tariffs on Taiwanese semiconductors is part of an effort to force Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to the negotiating table. In a speech to Republicans on Jan. 27, Trump said he intends to impose tariffs on Taiwan to bring chip production to the US. “The incentive is going to be they’re not going to want to pay a 25, 50 or even a 100 percent tax,” he said. Darson Chiu (邱達生), an economics professor at Taichung-based Tunghai University and director-general of
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) is reportedly making another pass at Nissan Motor Co, as the Japanese automaker's tie-up with Honda Motor Co falls apart. Nissan shares rose as much as 6 percent after Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported that Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) instructed former Nissan executive Jun Seki to connect with French carmaker Renault SA, which holds about 36 percent of Nissan’s stock. Hon Hai, the Taiwanese iPhone-maker also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), was exploring an investment or buyout of Nissan last year, but backed off in December after the Japanese carmaker penned a deal
WASHINGTON POLICY: Tariffs of 10 percent or more and other new costs are tipped to hit shipments of small parcels, cutting export growth by 1.3 percentage points The decision by US President Donald Trump to ban Chinese companies from using a US tariff loophole would hit tens of billions of dollars of trade and reduce China’s economic growth this year, according to new estimates by economists at Nomura Holdings Inc. According to Nomura’s estimates, last year companies such as Shein (希音) and PDD Holdings Inc’s (拼多多控股) Temu shipped US$46 billion of small parcels to the US to take advantage of the rule that allows items with a declared value under US$800 to enter the US tariff-free. Tariffs of 10 percent or more and other new costs would slash such
‘LEGACY CHIPS’: Chinese companies have dramatically increased mature chip production capacity, but the West’s drive for secure supply chains offers a lifeline for Taiwan When Powerchip Technology Corp (力晶科技) entered a deal with the eastern Chinese city of Hefei in 2015 to set up a new chip foundry, it hoped the move would help provide better access to the promising Chinese market. However, nine years later, that Chinese foundry, Nexchip Semiconductor Corp (合晶集成), has become one of its biggest rivals in the legacy chip space, leveraging steep discounts after Beijing’s localization call forced Powerchip to give up the once-lucrative business making integrated circuits for Chinese flat panels. Nexchip is among Chinese foundries quickly winning market share in the crucial US$56.3 billion industry of so-called legacy