WATER SYSTEMS IN DATA CENTERS

Data centers are among the most energy-intensive facilities on the planet, consuming approximately 200–250 terawatt-hours of electricity annually worldwide. Within that enormous energy budget, cooling systems account for a disproportionately large share — often 30 to 40 percent of total facility power consumption. As compute densities climb with the proliferation of AI accelerators and high-performance workloads, the engineering challenge of keeping silicon cool has never been more consequential.
This book is written for the practitioners who design, operate, and optimize the water-based systems that make modern data centers possible: mechanical engineers, facilities managers, data center infrastructure engineers, and the architects who must balance reliability, efficiency, and safety in equal measure.
The chapters that follow cover the full landscape of water systems in data centers — from the fundamental trade-offs between water-cooled and air-cooled architectures, through the operational science of cooling tower optimization, the critical discipline of water treatment and Legionella control, the engineering of leak detection systems, and finally the specialized world of glycol-based cooling for high-density and edge deployments.
Each topic is approached from first principles, with practical guidance, design tables, and real-world case studies drawn from operating facilities. Whether you are commissioning a new hyperscale campus or retrofitting a legacy colocation floor, this reference aims to give you the knowledge to make better decisions about one of the most critical — and most overlooked — dimensions of data center infrastructure.