Aside from being more energy-efficient, liquid-cooled cards offer another advantage over air-cooled counterparts: they take up substantially less space, allowing you to fit more of them in the same amount of space.
Nvidia’s drive to reduce energy consumption through liquid cooling comes at a time when many businesses are concerned about the amount of energy their servers consume. While data centres are far from the main source of carbon emissions and pollution for big tech, they are an important piece of the issue, and critics have argued that offsetting energy use with credits isn’t as effective as cutting consumption entirely. In order to utilise less electricity and water, companies such as Microsoft have experimented with totally burying servers under liquid and even putting entire data centres in the ocean.
Of course, such options are quite exotic – while the type of liquid-cooling Nvidia’s giving isn’t necessarily the norm for data centres, it’s not as far-fetched as putting your servers in the ocean (though Microsoft’s efforts with that have been surprisingly successful so far). Nvidia specifically markets their liquid-cooled GPUs as “mainstream” servers rather than cutting-edge solutions.
