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3M's PFAS exit killed the supply chain for two-phase immersion cooling in DCs

49 points by jackdilusso

by idbehold

2 subcomments

I guess the first ten upvotes are people who just read the headline as the link is currently incorrect and doesn't actually show the article with this headline. Link should be update to https://thecoolingreport.com/intel/pfas-two-phase-immersion-...

by embedding-shape

1 subcomments

> 3M did not make this call because they found a better product. They made it because they were staring down over 4,000 lawsuits and a $12.5 billion settlement with more than 11,000 U.S. public water systems alleging PFAS contamination in drinking water. The settlement received final court approval in March 2024. Payments stretch over 13 years.
> Who Got Hurt, Who Didn't
It seems to have had an massive impact, and article also includes a "who got hurt" but there is zero numbers about the number of people actually impacted by this catastrophe? I'm guessing the blogs focus might be on businesses, but considering this might be spawning something of a health crisis in the affected areas, maybe at least a mention of the humans involved here would make sense.

by mark-r

8 subcomments

I've never understood one vital thing - if PFAS is by nature totally inert and unreactive, how is it harmful? If you drank a glass of the stuff, what would happen?

by jokoon

0 subcomment

I got a thin raincoat, a thing I can roll and pack in my bag, I have been carrying it around for the last 10 years or so.
I think it was advertised as very water proof, like water would pearl on it.
It's probably full of PFAS, no idea if it has been leeching PFAS, but I know it's not very waterproof anymore, so that might be a worrying clue.

by nubinetwork

1 subcomments

If we can't buy florinert anymore, does that mean we should go back to mineral oil?

by avazhi

1 subcomments

by api

2 subcomments

In cold climate markets with a lot of fiber or other very fast access like very good 5G, why don’t AI companies or their cloud vendors market home or building scale heating compute nodes?
They could be built so that they exhaust waste heat into the HVAC system in winter and then switch to an outside piped radiator in the summer or something similar.
End users wouldn’t buy it. They’d make some kind of deal where one is installed and they pay less for heat and the extra electricity is paid by the compute operator via a separate meter. So the DC operator gets cooling that is (averaged over the year) almost free since they are basically reselling the heat for half the year or more.
For individual homes it might be unwieldy to manage a bunch of small units, so apartment/condo blocks and businesses might make more sense for installation. They could be colocated with building HVAC.
I guess economics depends on what percentage of DC cost is power or water for cooling.

by amelius

0 subcomment

Big fan of less DCs and more local computing. Hopefully this will help restore the RAM market.