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

https://thecoolingreport.com/intel.html
34•jackdilusso•1h ago

Comments

nubinetwork•49m ago
If we can't buy florinert anymore, does that mean we should go back to mineral oil?
jrjeksjd8d•37m ago
TFA points out that single-phase immersion systems work fine without PFAS. This change affects two-phase systems that rely on the coolant evaporating at a low temperature (60C) and recondensing.

Florinert can be formulated for either one-phase or two depending on boiling point. Mineral oil is only suitable for single-phase because you cannot deep fry your CPU (it boils at 200C)

idbehold•45m ago
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-...
cheschire•25m ago
"Two-phase immersion cooling is not dead. ZutaCore and Chemours are both pushing toward PFAS-free solutions that could revive the segment. But the timeline for commercial-scale availability of those alternatives stretches through 2026 and into 2027. The EU regulatory decision could land before the alternative fluids do. And the hyperscalers who were the most likely buyers at scale have already moved on."

Feels analogous to looking for cold fusion because of the downsides of fission.

I didn't get a significant sense of loss from this article though. Especially given the downsides of PFAS.

mark-r•15m ago
It took me about a second to realize the link took you to a list of articles. It took another second to realize the article referenced was second in the list.
embedding-shape•42m ago
> 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.

bondarchuk•35m ago
At least where I live the PFAS disaster is so widely known and publicized that I would say it's fair to leave it out of scope for this article. Oh and "who got hurt" - basically everyone worldwide for the foreseeable future.
embedding-shape•33m ago
> At least where I live the PFAS disaster is so widely known and publicized that I would say it's fair to leave it out of scope for this article

Doesn't that kind of assume that I and everyone too also been impacted, so we should have read about it in our local news? I don't think 3M's PFAS disaster ever been mentioned in either my country's newspaper, nor my local paper, my first time reading about it here, so would be nice if the article didn't make such assumptions.

happytoexplain•24m ago
I would think, but maybe not. In the US, the story was enormously reported on, perhaps second only to the Epstein files, with a long tail that still persists now. They are also called "forever chemicals", if you've heard that term.

Many municipalities across the country were/are forced to upgrade their water filtration systems - a huge cost, possibly too little and too late. I know many other countries are taking action too, but I don't know how it compares to how the US responded.

markdown•7m ago
Not to mention there was a movie about it https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/
amelius•18m ago
Big fan of less DCs and more local computing. Hopefully this will help restore the RAM market.
jokoon•18m ago
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.

mark-r•17m ago
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?
franktankbank•14m ago
Making PFAS and having to dispose of byproducts is the nasty part as far as I understand. There is also some kind of reaction that can happen where it will off gas nasty enough stuff to kill your pet bird if you overheat your pan.
piva00•12m ago
PFAS used to be considered totally inert but later research showed correlations between bad health effects and higher concentrations of PFOA and PFOS.

3M and DuPont knew since the 1970s and suppressed the information, not dissimilar to how tobacco and oil industries created disinformation about externalities.

kees99•11m ago
Fluoroalkyl chemicals are only "inert and unreactive" in a very narrow sense of "wouldn't catch fire".

They are plenty reactive in a sense of interacting with enzymes and other cellular machinery.

VladVladikoff•6m ago
Not biologically inert. And they bioaccumulate in humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PFAS&section=10
api•15m ago
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.

franktankbank•12m ago
LOL. You can hack any computer if you have local access. No way in hell you could ever get past the most basic of audits with such a business layout.
api•7m ago
Every use case isn’t security critical. There’s a lot of AI used to render silly images and films, generate marketing copy, play games, proofread social media posts, etc.

You solve this by charging a little more for security certified AI that runs in a secure DC.

You can also easily randomize AI work load distribution, so individual nodes don’t get all queries for a whole coherent conversation or project. It makes an attack less valuable.

Apple has done some research on blinding and obfuscating AI too.

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