DeepGreen: Swiss Lake-Cooled Data Center

James Hamilton of Amazon writes about the interesting new DeepGreen data center project in Switzerland. It's one of a growing number of data centers using nearby bodies of water to provide cooling for thousands of servers.

The DeepGreen data center is a 46 megawatt facility planned on the shores of Lake Walensee in Switzerland.
"This facility is cooled using 43F source water from 197 feet below the surface," James writes. "The source water is brought in through dual redundant intake pipes to the pumping station with 6 high-capacity pumps in a 2*(N+1) configuration. The pumps move 668,000 gallons per hour at full cooling load.

The fairly clean lake water is run through a heat exchanger to cool the closed-system, chilled water loop used in the datacenter," he continues. "The use of a heat exchanger avoids bringing impurities or life forms into the datacenter chilled water loop. The chilled water loop forms part of a conventional within-the-datacenter cooling system design. The difference is they have completely eliminated process-based cooling (air conditioning) and water towers avoiding both the purchase cost and the power these equipment would have consumed."

See James Hamilton's blog post for more detail and some slides illustrating the systems planned for DeepGreen.