this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Practically all even semi-modern DCs are built for servers themselves to be air cooled. The air itself is cooled via a heat exchanger with a separate and isolated chiller and cooling tower. The isolated chiller is essentially the swamp cooler, but it's isolated from the servers.
There are cases where servers are directly liquid cooled, but it's mostly just the recent Nvidia GPUs and niche things like high-frequency-trading and crypto ASICs.
All this said... For the longest time I water cooled my home lab's compute server because I thought it was necessary to reduce noise. But, with proper airflow and a good tower cooler, you can get basically just as quiet. All without the maintenance and risk of water, pumps, tubing, etc.
a chiller is not a swamp cooler.
picture a fan with a wet sponge in front of it... that is a swamp cooler.
Yea, it's the combo of the chiller and cooling tower is analogous to a swamp cooler. The cooling tower provides the evaporative cooling. The difference is that rather than directly cooling the environment around the cooling tower, the chiller allows indirect cooling of the DC via heat exchange. And isolated chiller providing heat exchange is why humidity inside the DC isn't impacted by the evaporative cooling. And sure, humidity is different between hot and cold isles. That is just a function of temperature and relative humidity. But, no moisture is exchanged into the DC to cool the DC.
Edit: Turns out I'm a bit misinformed. Apparently in dry environments that can deal with the added moisture, DCs are built that indeed use simple direct evaporative cooling.