Water-Free Cooling of Data Centers via Irreversibility Control in Computation

Modern AI data centers consume enormous amounts of freshwater due to heat generated by irreversible computation, making cooling a growing environmental and infrastructure crisis. This paper reframes water-intensive data-centre cooling as a thermodynamic design failure rather than a cooling-technology limitation. By treating heat as a diagnostic signal of irreversible information processing, the work shows why improving chillers, immersion cooling, or evaporative systems alone cannot sustain future AI scaling. Building on an irreversibility-control framework, the paper demonstrates how reducing entropy production at the compute level directly suppresses heat generation, collapsing the need for water-based cooling altogether. Without proposing new materials or fabrication processes, it offers a practical, system-level path toward water-free data centers, sustainable AI infrastructure, and resilient semiconductor scaling—relevant to hyperscale computing, cloud providers, AI accelerators, and climate-constrained regions worldwide. The cleanest way to cool a data center is to stop creating the heat in the first place.