“Amazon is on the leading edge, but it’s not a secret recipe,” he said. What sets the company apart is scale, execution, facility design, geographic mix, and its aggressive pursuit of energy goals.
Others are doing the similar things, if through different avenues: Microsoft is investing in closed-loop cooling systems that dramatically reduce evaporative water loss. Google is heavily focused on reclaimed water and using AI to optimize data centers. Meta has long relied on outside-air cooling. And overall, the industry is moving toward liquid cooling for dense AI deployments, “which changes the water equation again,” said Kimball.
One of the big variables is location: Climate influences water efficiency, so where a company builds its infrastructure is as important as its cooling methods. Further, power-consumptive AI changes the discussion, he emphasized; traditional enterprise workloads and dense AI training clusters create very different thermal profiles.
