US data centers use 17 to 19 billion gallons of water to cool their hot-running chips each year — and that number is expected to to triple in the next five years, according to the Water Foundation.
That’s an expensive and politically tricky proposition for investors throwing billions of dollars at the challenge of scaling up AI. One way to use less water is to do a better job monitoring the cooling fluids, a task that currently involves sending samples away to a laboratory for tests in a multi-day process.