"Chillers and cooling towers are at the heart of most large data center cooling setups. The chiller cools down water, dropping its temperature before it heads to CRAH units or other cooling coils.

Cooling towers push this heat out to the open air, usually by evaporating water. Pairing these together lets chilled water systems handle much bigger loads than just using CRAC units alone.

Key components include:

• Chillers: Make chilled water for cooling coils
• Cooling towers: Get rid of heat from the chiller’s condenser water loop
• Pumps: Move water around between units and throughout the system

Chilled water systems are efficient and can scale up, but they do need a big upfront investment and regular maintenance. They’re the go-to for hyperscale and enterprise data centers where uptime and energy use really matter."

In industrial cooling applications, chilled water is run over massive radiators to dissipate heat more efficiently. This usually causes a good portion of the water to be evaporated. The problems with these massive data centers is that they can pump millions of gallons of groundwater a day only to be evaporated to the atmosphere. They end up pumping more groundwater than can be restored naturally, causing groundwater levels to fall which leads to all sorts of other issues.