Cooling data centres: How pumps and valves enable artificial intelligence
Updated on June 1, 2026
From self-driving vehicles to scientific breakthroughs: Artificial intelligence promises us opportunities we never had before. However, for these opportunities to become true we will need more data centres, whose energy consumption will increase considerably and become a challenge for climate protection as well as for individual countries’ infrastructure. This is where efficient pumps and valves can contribute to a solution.
AI will drastically drive up power consumption
Artificial intelligence is power hungry: According to an IEA estimate, data centres used 415 terawatt hours in the year 2024 already(opens in a new tab). This is about 1.5 percent of global energy consumption. By 2030 – primarily driven by AI – this share is predicted to rise to three percent. This would take the power consumption of data centres to 945 TWh or the equivalent of Japan's entire energy use.
The development of the quantity of energy consumed by AI servers sheds light on the speed at which power consumption for artificial intelligence is going to grow. The DGX B200 system by Nvidia(opens in a new tab) is currently considered one of the most powerful servers for AI tasks. Each of its GPUs consumes 1000 watts. An entire server system uses up to 14.3 kilowatts, which is roughly the equivalent of a professional kitchen unit in a commercial kitchen.
For comparison: Its predecessor NVIDIA H100(opens in a new tab) had an energy consumption of 700 watts per GPU. The Rubin platform, announced for the second half of 2026, is expected to draw up to 2300 watts per GPU.
In some countries, the energy demand of data centres will reach extreme dimensions: In Ireland, for example, the share of power consumed by data centres already makes up 22 percent of the country's total power consumption(opens in a new tab) – entailing challenges for national climate protection targets and the country’s infrastructure. This is where pumps and valves can contribute to a solution.
Water is the more efficient coolant
AI applications will concentrate more and more power in individual server racks, generating progressively more heat and requiring increasingly efficient cooling. This is where air as a coolant hits its limits; new types of temperature control will become necessary. One option of improving cooling is to increasingly use water instead of air. Compared to air, water can absorb four times the amount of energy.
The more a data centre uses a liquid for cooling and the closer this liquid is to the processors, the lower the energy input. With artificial intelligence on the rise, the focus has shifted to cooling methods whose heat exchangers are located directly in the server racks (rear door cooling or in-rack cooling) or processors that are fitted with their own cooling circuits – similar to gaming PCs (direct liquid cooling or direct-to-chip cooling).
Liquid cooling is becoming the new standard for AI data centres. A prominent example is Tesla: The company has been operating its Cortex training cluster in Texas, comprising 50,000 NVIDIA-H100 GPUs, with liquid cooling since the end of 2024. The NVIDIA chip manufacturer offers its high-end systems such as the GB200 NVL72(opens in a new tab) exclusively as systems for which liquid cooling is no longer an option but a prerequisite. Microsoft also stated in its sustainability report for 2025 that all their data centres worldwide will incrementally be changed to liquid cooling(opens in a new tab) to decrease their CO2 footprint.
Holistic system optimisation saves the most energy
Data centre operators have to augment the efficiency of cooling to master the challenges of artificial intelligence. This is achieved by opting more for liquid cooling and making these cooling systems as efficient as possible. High efficiency of cooling circuits goes beyond the high efficiency of its individual components such as heat exchangers, pumps and valves. The components also have to be matched to each other to make sure they work together efficiently as a system. Precisely this holistic view of systems is KSB’s strength.
Figures demonstrate just how important optimising the overall system is. Ten percent of the energy consumption of a cooling circuit can be saved by installing high-efficiency pumps, such as KSB’s Etanorm, for example. KSB’s engineers have optimised this pump’s impeller to provide an optimum efficiency and prevent a drop in performance through cavitation also at low pressure. Its synchronous reluctance motor meets the requirements of the highest energy efficiency class IE5 (IEC/TS 60034-30-2); compared with IE4, motor losses are reduced by a further 20 percent.
Another ten percent of energy can be saved by using a frequency inverter for controlling the pump motors. KSB’s PumpDrive, for example, estimates the current operating point on the basis of the motor input power and speed. It identifies areas of motor inefficiency, such as extreme part load, dry running or overload, and adjusts the speed to the actual requirements.
However, by far the greatest potential for optimisation lies in improving the entire system – up to 60 percent in total. This percentage of energy can be saved by determining the actually required system pressure, for example, in order to dimension the pumps and impellers accordingly or prevent pressure losses by valves or bottlenecks.
KSB’s expertise ensures an optimum selection of cooling systems. An example is the FluidFuture® service as part of which KSB experts make use of potential savings by conducting measurements, selecting suitable high-efficiency pumps and components and taking care of proper installation and commissioning. The FluidFuture® energy saving concept(opens in a new tab) also comprises the operation of the system with continuous monitoring.
KSB offers high-efficiency components for cooling data centres
Our energy-efficient and reliable pumps and valves offer the highest performance at minimum energy consumption and sustainably contribute to lowering the energy costs of data centres.
