Data centers are thirsty. The kind of thirsty that drinks roughly 2.6 million gallons of water per megawatt of power every single year. Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin AI servers are designed to turn that firehose into a trickle, potentially reducing facility-level water consumption to near zero in the right climates.
The Vera Rubin NVL72 systems represent a full commitment to liquid cooling, not the hybrid approach Nvidia used with its Blackwell generation. These machines have no fans. Zero. Every watt of heat gets pulled away by a closed-loop coolant system running through cold plates mounted directly onto the processors.
How the plumbing actually works
The coolant is a mix of 75% water and 25% propylene glycol, the same stuff used in food-grade antifreeze. It circulates through cold plates that sit right on top of the processors, absorbing heat at the source before carrying it away.
The system operates at coolant temperatures up to 45 degrees Celsius, which is warm enough to reject heat into ambient air using dry coolers. Instead of evaporating millions of gallons of water through traditional cooling towers, the system just pushes warm air outside. No evaporation, no water loss.
