Power & cooling for AI data centres
AI data centres are limited by how much electricity they can get and how much heat they can remove.
D1 · StoryFor young children and total beginners
Computers get warm when they work hard, like your legs when you run. AI computers work very hard, all day and all night. So they need lots of electricity and lots of cooling.
Building one is a bit like building the power and air-conditioning for a small town. And it all goes to one room full of very busy computers.
Like: A room full of runners: they need lots of food (electricity) and they get hot, so you need big fans and cold water (cooling).
D2 · PictureFor curious beginners
Almost all the electricity a chip uses turns into heat, so getting power in and getting heat out are two sides of the same problem.
AI racks pack far more power into the same floor space than traditional server racks, which is why new facilities increasingly move from air cooling to liquid cooling.
Where a data centre can be built is often decided by grid connection capacity and permitting time, not by land.
Power in, heat out
- Grid: power supply
- Substation: plus backup
- Racks: chips compute
- Heat: nearly all energy
- Cooling: air or liquid
- Released: air or water
Like: Like a stadium on match day: the challenge isn't just building it, it's getting enough power in and enough heat out.
Where it breaks: A stadium peaks for a few hours. AI clusters run near full load around the clock, so they need steady supply, not just peak capacity.
D5 · FrontierFor experts
Open questions include how quickly grids can add capacity, whether on-site generation can close the gap, and how to account for the water used in cooling.
Whether efficiency gains per computation can keep pace with growth in total demand is actively debated.