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Comment by kristjansson

3 days ago

If you let the chip actual boil enough water to run a turbine you're going to have a hard time keeping the magic smoke inside. Much better to run at reasonable temps and try to recover energy from the waste heat.

What if you chose a refrigerant with a lower boiling point?

  • That's basically the principle of binary cycle[1] generators. However for data center waste heat recovery, I'd think you'd want to use a more stable fluid for cooling, and then pump it to a separate closed-loop binary-cycle generator. No reason to make your datacenter cooling system also deal with high pressure fluids, and moving high pressure working fluid from 1000s of chips to a turbine of sufficient size, etc.

    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_cycle