Nvidia employee says Microsoft’s cooling system for Blackwell GPUs ‘wasteful’, company responds – The Times of India

An Nvidia employee may not be satisfied with Microsoft’s cooling system for its Blackwell GPUs. In an internal email, the Nvidia employee who wishes to remain anonymous claimed that at one of the data centre facilities, Microsoft’s cooling approach was “wasteful.” This comes as the chip giant works to deploy its powerful new GPUs. The employee, who is a part of the Nvidia Infrastructure Specialists (NVIS) team, sent the memo to describe a Blackwell installation intended for OpenAI, which Microsoft supports as its cloud partner. According to Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, even though servers use liquid cooling, data centres still rely on a second, building-wide system to remove heat from the facility. Ren, who researches data centre resource use, said the Nvidia employee was likely referring to a building-level cooling system that uses air instead of water. “This type of cooling system tends to use more energy, but it doesn’t use water,” he highlighted. A Microsoft spokesperson’s explanation of the company’s cooling system also aligned with Ren’s two-step description.

What Microsoft said about its liquid cooling system for GPUs

In a statement to Business Insider, a Microsoft spokesperson said: “Microsoft’s liquid cooling heat exchanger unit is a closed-loop system that we deploy in existing air-cooled data centres to…