Thinking on Paper Podcast

Data centers use water to cool air, not chips. The water chills the air that gets blown across the racks, and that is where it evaporates. Remove the air and you remove most of the water.

Simon Jesenko runs Iceotope, which builds cooling with no fans and no air at all. Fifteen to twenty litres of refined oil circulating inside a sealed chassis, touching every component. His point about the headlines: they describe air-cooled facilities, and the industry is moving off them. Once a site runs fully liquid-cooled, he says consumption drops immensely.

In this podcast, hosted by Mark Fielding and Jeremy Gilbertson, he explains:

• Why direct-to-chip cooling only solves 80 percent of the problem, and what stays hot
• What the dielectric liquid actually is, where it comes from, and why Shell and Exxon make it
• Why early liquid cooling installs leaked, and what that did to the industry's appetite for risk
• Why the power supply unit, not the GPU, is where his technology wins
• Why crypto miners proved immersion cooling years before data centers

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