Originally posted on ITPro.
This sustainable AI data center in Portugal has repurposed the ocean cooling infrastructure of a discontinued coal plant
There’s a reason why most coal power plants were built by the coast. It’s the ocean, nature’s liquid chiller, where they can pipe cooling seawater through their systems and reduce the heat from production.
Liquid cooling is by no means a new technology, having been first used in the 60s to chill mainframe computers. Most data centers today already use some fashion of liquid cooling, with the average facility consuming roughly 300,000 gallons of water per day.
And, as liquid cooling becomes ever more popular, we must seek ways to implement it in a way that doesn’t cost the Earth. One way to do it is currently being developed in Portugal by the data center company Start Campus which has repurposed the infrastructure of a discontinued coal power plant.
In collaboration with Schneider Electric, Start Campus has seen the construction of a sprawling AI data center campus on the Portuguese coast. The site, which has been operational since October 2024, has been built to be Europe’s largest and most sustainable AI-ready data ecosystem.
The location is crucial; situated in the port town of Sines (pronounced Sin-edge), 100-odd miles south of Lisbon, where there is a deep basin of ocean water to easily pipe through the facility. But the basin is more specific than that – it’s a man-made basin, built to cool the coal mine which still looms in the background of the Sines DC.
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