u/Oliver4587Queen

Water is the most reliable way to kill a new data centre right now. People living near proposed sites in Arizona, Georgia, and Spain have turned cooling water into a planning fight, and the UN warned in June that AI water use could match the yearly needs of 1.3 billion people by 2030. So when Nvidia published a new cooling design and said it could cut water use by up to 100 percent, it was aiming straight at the thing that stalls projects fastest.

The trick is running everything hot. Instead of cold air and cold water, Nvidia's systems push coolant up to 45 degrees Celsius, hotter than a hot tub, through a sealed loop that gets filled once and never evaporates. Because the liquid stays hot, the building can dump heat through outdoor radiators instead of the evaporative cooling towers that drink millions of gallons. In a cool climate a 50-megawatt site could save more than four million dollars a year on water and power combined. That part is real.

The catch is the phrase up to. In hot places like Phoenix the outside air gets too warm for those radiators on some days, so backup chillers kick in, and those still want water. Even Nvidia's own people split on it, with one academic calling truly zero water unrealistic while the company's sustainability chief told a London audience the water problem is largely solved.

The bigger catch is what the number covers. Cooling the chips on site is only about a quarter to a third of the water an AI system uses in its life. The rest is upstream, in the power plants feeding the building and the factories making the chips, and no coolant loop touches any of that. A data centre running a bone dry loop on a gas grid is still soaking up water somewhere else.

It is a real engineering win wearing marketing two sizes too big.

Wrote the full breakdown in SavvyMonk if you want it: https://savvymonk.beehiiv.com/p/nvidia-says-ai-data-centres-can-run-on-almost-no-water-but-there-is-a-catch

Samsung makes a specific kind of memory chip called HBM, the stuff every AI data center needs to feed its GPUs, and demand has run so far past supply that production is sold out through 2026. That turned Samsung's chip division into a money machine, with operating profit projected to jump roughly sevenfold this year to around 218 billion dollars.

The workers who actually make those chips noticed. Samsung's largest union, about 48,000 semiconductor workers, threatened an 18-day strike unless they got a real cut of the AI profits. With the whole industry depending on chips only a few companies can make, that is enormous leverage, and Samsung folded.

The deal is a 10-year profit-sharing agreement that pays out 10.5 percent of the chip division's operating profit as stock plus another 1.5 percent in cash. The total pool lands around 26.6 billion dollars, which works out to average bonuses near 340,000 dollars a person. They also scrapped the old rule that capped bonuses at half of annual pay, because the division kept slamming into that ceiling.

It helped that rival SK Hynix had already agreed to a 10 percent profit share back in September, so once a competitor's workers had it, Samsung's negotiations got pointed fast.

The catch is the drama inside the building. The formula heavily favors the memory chip unit, so workers in mobile, display, and consumer electronics get far less. A smaller union of mostly non-chip staff has already filed a legal injunction to block the whole thing. And across South Korea, workers in other industries are now using the Samsung deal as a template to ask for their own slice.

Wrote the full breakdown in SavvyMonk if you want it: https://savvymonk.beehiiv.com/p/samsung-hands-its-chip-workers-26-6-billion-in-bonuses-because-ai-made-it-rich

Earlier this year a group of engineers at Amazon built an internal dashboard called KiroRank. It sat on Kiro, Amazon's own AI coding tool, measured how much each person used AI, and ranked everyone against everyone else. The point was to push adoption, since Amazon already wanted more than 80 percent of its developers using AI every week.

What it got was a lesson in Goodhart's law. Once people could see their rank, the goal stopped being good work and became a bigger number. Engineers pointed AI agents at trivial tasks and ran the same calls over and over just to climb. Internally they called it tokenmaxxing. And none of it was free, because every call ran on Amazon's own cloud and landed as real cost.

It got bad enough that a senior VP named Dave Treadwell emailed staff telling them to stop using AI for the sake of it. Then they pulled the dashboard, calling it an unofficial beta tool a few employees built.

And it is not just Amazon. Meta ran the same thing with a board called Claudeonomics that logged 60 trillion tokens in one month before it leaked and got killed. Microsoft cancelled its own Claude Code licenses once the bills ran past budget. Token based pricing means usage and cost rise together, so any leaderboard that rewards usage just burns money.

Amazon's fix is the smart part. It did not stop measuring, it switched to tracking AI code that actually ships and proves useful instead of raw call volume.

Wrote the full breakdown in SavvyMonk if you want it: https://savvymonk.beehiiv.com/p/amazon-pulled-the-plug-on-an-ai-leaderboard-its-engineers-gamed-for-points