Cooling System Estimator

Nearly every watt a datacenter feeds its servers comes back out as heat, and removing that heat is the largest energy cost after the computing itself. It's the dominant term in PUE, the ratio that scales the entire facility bill — so how efficiently you cool is, quite literally, half the economics of running AI infrastructure.

The master number is the coefficient of performance: how much heat the cooling rejects per unit of energy it spends. A COP of 5 removes five kilowatts of heat for one kilowatt of cooling power. Because cooling power is just the heat load divided by COP, a higher COP cuts cooling energy proportionally — and the methods span a wide range, from room air conditioning around 3, through chilled water near 5 and direct-to-chip liquid near 10, to free cooling that effectively exceeds 20 where the climate allows. Each step up the ladder is a step down in the bill and in PUE.

This is why the AI build-out forced a cooling transition. Air simply can't reject the heat density of dense accelerator racks at acceptable energy, so the industry moved to liquid — cold plates and immersion — which both handle far more kilowatts per rack and run at much higher COP. The choice is now both a capability question (can it remove the heat at all?) and an efficiency question (at what energy and PUE?), and this console answers both by comparing the methods side by side.

Two levers sit on top. Utilization sets how much heat is actually generated over a year, so the cost reflects the real duty cycle. And climate makes free cooling a siting decision — cool air or water turns refrigeration nearly free, which is why hyperscalers chase cold locations. Feed the cooling PUE this tool derives into the whole-facility view in the Data Center Power console.