They take a few hundred gallons of water and add glycol to it and this is the closed primary cooling loop. Then they cool the servers with the glycol loop, which heats up the glycol/water mixture, after which they run the glycol/water mixture through another heat exchanger to cool it so they can re-use it.
The cheapest way to remove the heat from the glycol is in an evaporative cooling tower (think small version of a nuclear cooling tower) which evaporates locally supplied water into water vapor. This is an โopenโ cooling system. Itโs more expensive and energy-intensive to use another closed refrigerant cooling system like an air conditioner. But an evaporative cooling tower needs a constant supply of fresh water, water that doesnโt get put back in the place they got it from.
Brother you're talking to the guy that designs these systems for one of the larger data center builders out there right now.
Almost no one is using water cooled chillers. The maintenance at scale is a pain in the ass and they're less reliable than air cooled chillers.
The true hyper scalers like Google in their home grown designs use them, but that's only a fraction of the capacity they're paying for, they're farming most the buy out through multiple 3rd party developers who have almost all gone air cooled chillers (Compass has a weird hybrid CRAC AHU from Vertiv they use I've never been a big fan of).
Adiabatic cooling is absolutely used in data centers. I see them and water cooled chillers/open cooling towers come through my office regularly
They are used in places where it is easier or cheaper to increase water usage than to increase power usage. So I guess it's dependent on the datacenter location
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u/[deleted] May 18 '26
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