Cooling the Machine Without Heating the Planet: TCHES 2.1

Data centers are becoming denser, hotter, and more geographically concentrated. The International Energy Agency estimated that data centers consumed about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 and projects roughly 945 terawatt-hours by 2030 in its base case. Cooling is not a single universal percentage of that load: it can be comparatively modest in an efficient hyperscale facility and much larger in older or less-optimized enterprise sites. That variation matters. A new cooling technology must compete against the best modern liquid-cooling system available, not against a tired chiller selected for rhetorical convenience.