Liquid cooling removes that heat more efficiently than air, but evaporative heat rejection still consumes water.

Operators are responding according to location. Microsoft’ s data centre designs since August 2024 use closed-loop, chip-level cooling to avoid evaporation, accepting a nominal increase in energy use. Start Campus cools its Sines campus with seawater through infrastructure inherited from a decommissioned power station, making site selection a water decision as well as a power one.

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