
Traditionally, data centers have relied on air cooling - where mechanical chillers circulate chilled air to absorb heat from servers, helping them maintain optimal conditions. But as AI models increase in size, and the use of AI reasoning models rises, maintaining those optimal conditions is not only getting harder and more expensive - but more energy-intensive.
While data centers once operated at 20 kW per rack, today's hyperscale facilities can support over 135 kW per rack, making it an order of magnitude harder to dissipate the heat generated by high-density racks. To keep AI servers running at peak performance, a new approach is needed for efficiency and scalability.
One key solution is liquid cooling - by reducing dependence on chillers and enabling more efficient heat rejection, liquid cooling is driving the next generation of high-performance, energy-efficient AI infrastructure.
The NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 are rack-scale, liquid-cooled systems designed to handle the demanding tasks of trillion-parameter large language model inference. Their architecture is also specifically optimized for test-time scaling accuracy and performance, making it an ideal choice for running AI reasoning models while efficiently managing energy costs and heat.
Liquid-cooled NVIDIA Blackwell compute tray. Driving Unprecedented Water Efficiency and Cost Savings in AI Data Centers Historically, cooling alone has accounted for up to 40% of a data center's electricity consumption, making it one of the most significant areas where efficiency improvements can drive down both operational expenses and energy demands.
Liquid cooling helps mitigate costs and energy use by capturing heat directly at the source. Instead of relying on air as an intermediary, direct-to-chip liquid cooling transfers heat in a technology cooling system loop. That heat is then cycled through a coolant distribution unit via liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger, and ultimately transferred to a facility cooling loop. Because of the higher efficiency of this heat transfer, data centers and AI factories can operate effectively with warmer water temperatures - reducing or eliminating the need for mechanical chillers in a wide range of climates.
The NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack-scale, liquid-cooled system, built on the NVIDIA Blackwell platform, offers exceptional performance while balancing energy costs and heat. It packs unprecedented compute density into each server rack, delivering 40x higher revenue potential, 30x higher throughput, 25x more energy efficiency and 300x more water efficiency than traditional air-cooled architectures. Newer NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems built on the Blackwell Ultra platform boast a 50x higher revenue potential and 35x higher throughput with 30x more energy efficiency.
Data centers spend an estimated $1.9-2.8M per megawatt (MW) per year, which amounts to nearly $500,000 spent annually on cooling-related energy and water costs. By deploying the liquid-cooled GB200 NVL72 system, hyperscale data centers and AI factories can achieve up to 25x cost savings, leading to over $4 million dollars in annual savings for a 50 MW hyperscale data center.
For data center and AI factory operators, this means lower operational costs, enhanced energy efficiency metrics and a future-proof infrastructure that scales AI workloads efficiently - without the unsustainable water footprint of legacy cooling methods.
Moving Heat Outside the Data Center As compute density rises and AI workloads drive unprecedented thermal loads, data centers and AI factories must rethink how they remove heat from their infrastructure. The traditional methods of heat rejection that supported predictable CPU-based scaling are no longer sufficient on their own. Today, there are multiple options for moving heat outside the facility, but four major categories dominate current and emerging deployments.
Key Cooling Methods in a Changing Landscape
Mechanical Chillers: Mechanical chillers use a vapor compression cycle to cool water, which is then circulated through the data center to absorb heat. These systems are typically air-cooled or water-cooled, with the latter often paired with cooling towers to reject heat. While chillers are reliable and effective across diverse climates, they are also highly energy-intensive. In AI-scale facilities where power consumption and sustainability are top priorities, reliance on chillers can significantly impact both operational costs and carbon footprint.
Evaporative Cooling: Evaporative cooling uses the evaporation of water to absorb and remove heat. This can be achieved through direct or indirect systems, or hybrid designs. These systems are much more energy-efficient than chillers but come with high water consumption. In large facilities, they can consume millions of gallons of water per megawatt annually. Their performance is also climate-dependent, making them less effective in humid or water-restricted regions.
Dry Coolers: Dry coolers remove heat by transferring it from a closed liquid loop to the ambient air using large finned coils, much like an automotive radiator. These systems don't rely on water and are ideal for facilities aiming to reduce water usage or operate in dry climates. However, their effectiveness depends heavily on the temperature of the surrounding air. In warmer environments, they may struggle to keep up with high-density cooling demands unless paired with liquid-cooled IT systems that can tolerate higher operating temperatures.
Pumped Refrigerant Systems: Pumped refrigerant systems use liquid refrigerants to move heat from the data center to outdoor heat exchangers. Unlike chillers, these systems don't rely on large compressors inside the facility and they operate without the use of water. This method offers a thermodynamically efficient, compact and scalable so
More from Nvidia
24/06/2025
From the heart of Germany's automotive sector to manufacturing hubs across F...
19/06/2025
GeForce NOW is throwing open the vault doors to welcome the legendary Borderland series to the cloud.
Whether a seasoned Vault Hunter or new to the mayhem of P...
18/06/2025
Project G-Assist - available through the NVIDIA App - is an experimental AI assistant that helps tune, control and optimize NVIDIA GeForce RTX systems.
NVIDIA&...
17/06/2025
As a global labor shortage leaves 50 million positions unfilled across industrie...
13/06/2025
Industrial AI isn't slowing down. Germany is ready.
Following London Tech Week and GTC Paris at VivaTech, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang's Europea...
12/06/2025
Generative AI has reshaped how people create, imagine and interact with digital ...
12/06/2025
Level up GeForce NOW experiences this summer with 40% off Performance Day Passes. Enjoy 24 hours of premium cloud gaming with RTX ON, delivering low latency and...
11/06/2025
NVIDIA is launching a comprehensive, industry-defining autonomous vehicle (AV) software platform to accelerate large-scale deployment of safe, intelligent trans...
11/06/2025
NVIDIA Research has developed an AI light switch for videos that can turn daytim...
11/06/2025
Using NVIDIA platforms, tools and libraries, European telecommunications institu...
11/06/2025
NVIDIA was today named an Autonomous Grand Challenge winner at the Computer Visi...
11/06/2025
In the face of growing labor shortages and need for sustainability, European man...
11/06/2025
AI is packing and shipping efficiency for the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries, with a majority of surveyed companies in the space reporting ...
11/06/2025
Urban populations are expected to double by 2050, which means around 2.5 billion...
11/06/2025
Telecom companies last year spent nearly $295 billion in capital expenditures an...
11/06/2025
In a new effort to advance sovereign AI for European public service media, NVIDI...
11/06/2025
At GTC Paris - held alongside VivaTech, Europe's largest tech event - NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang delivered a clear message: Europe isn't just a...
10/06/2025
Germany's Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, LRZ, is gaining a new supercomputer...
10/06/2025
With a more detailed simulation of the Earth's climate, scientists and resea...
10/06/2025
Cisco and NVIDIA are helping set a new standard for secure, scalable and high-performance enterprise AI.
Announced today at the Cisco Live conference in San Di...
09/06/2025
AI isn't waiting. And this week, neither is Europe.
At London's Olympia, under a ceiling of steel beams and enveloped by the thrum of startup pitches, ...
08/06/2025
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer's ambition for Britain to be an AI maker, not an AI taker, is becoming a reality at London Tech Week.
With NVIDIA's ...
05/06/2025
GeForce NOW is a gamer's ticket to an unforgettable summer of gaming. With 25 titles coming this month and endless ways to play, the summer is going to be e...
04/06/2025
NVIDIA is working with companies worldwide to build out AI factories - speeding ...
04/06/2025
Humans learn the norms, values and behaviors of society from each other - and Bernt B rnich, founder and CEO of 1X Technologies, thinks robots should learn like...
04/06/2025
4:2:2 cameras - capable of capturing double the color information compared with most standard cameras - are becoming widely available for consumers. At the same...
02/06/2025
Editor's note: This blog, originally published on October 28, 2024, has been...
02/06/2025
Since a 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Syria and T rkiye two years ago - leaving 5...
29/05/2025
Ready for a front-row seat to the next scientific revolution?
That's the idea behind Doudna - a groundbreaking supercomputer announced today at Lawrence Be...
29/05/2025
Large language models (LLMs), trained on datasets with billions of tokens, can generate high-quality content. They're the backbone for many of the most popu...
29/05/2025
GeForce NOW is supercharging Valve's Steam Deck with a new native app - delivering the high-quality GeForce RTX-powered gameplay members are used to on a po...
28/05/2025
Building effective agentic AI systems requires rethinking how technology interac...
27/05/2025
Over a century ago, Henry Ford pioneered the mass production of cars and engines...
27/05/2025
NVIDIA and Google share a long-standing relationship rooted in advancing AI inno...
22/05/2025
GeForce NOW is turning up the heat this summer with a hot new deal. For a limited time, save 40% on six-month Performance memberships and enjoy premium GeForce ...
21/05/2025
As robots increasingly make their way to the largest enterprises' manufacturing plants and warehouses, the need for access to critical business and operatio...
20/05/2025
Industrial AI is transforming how factories operate, innovate and scale.
The convergence of AI, simulation and digital twins is poised to unlock new levels of ...
19/05/2025
Agentic AI is redefining scientific discovery and unlocking research breakthroughs and innovations across industries. Through deepened collaboration, NVIDIA and...
19/05/2025
Across robot training and development, NVIDIA Research is uncovering breakthroughs in areas such as multimodal generative AI and synthetic data generation.
The...
19/05/2025
Generative AI is transforming PC software into breakthrough experiences - from digital humans to writing assistants, intelligent agents and creative tools.
NVI...
18/05/2025
Electricity. The Internet. Now it's time for another major technology, AI, to sweep the globe.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at a pack...
18/05/2025
Empowering engineering teams with more tools for building AI factories, NVIDIA t...
18/05/2025
The age of video analytics AI agents is here.
Video is one of the defining feat...
18/05/2025
TSMC, Cadence, KLA, Siemens and Synopsys are advancing semiconductor manufacturi...
18/05/2025
NVIDIA is highlighting significant momentum for its new Grace CPU C1 this week at the COMPUTEX trade show in Taipei, with a strong showing of support from key o...
18/05/2025
Researchers across Taiwan are tackling complex challenges in AI development, climate science and quantum computing. Their work will soon be boosted by a new sup...
18/05/2025
Leading healthcare organizations across the globe are using agentic AI, robotics...
18/05/2025
Quantum computing promises to shorten the path to solving some of the world'...
15/05/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on ...
15/05/2025
AI is creating value for everyone - from researchers in drug discovery to quantitative analysts navigating financial market changes.
The faster an AI system ca...