A chip does not use electricity up. Every watt that goes into a GPU comes back out as heat, and a building full of them is really a machine for moving that heat outside. This model follows both trips: power in from the left, heat out through the roof.
The grid arrives at the transformers in the yard, which step it down for the building. Switchgear routes it, batteries (UPS) carry the load for the seconds a generator needs to start, and copper busways run it over the racks. Turn on the power layer (the plug) to watch it flow.
Cold air rises through perforated floor tiles, is pulled through the servers front to back, and leaves hot. Pod A walls in its hot aisle: the two rows breathe out into the narrow aisle between them, and that air rises to the cooling units on the ceiling. Pod B does it the other way round: its cold aisle is walled in, and its racks breathe out into the room around them. Either way the hot air reaches a coil of cold water, gives up its heat, and goes back under the floor.
Pod A's racks (about 41 kW each, like four 8-GPU H100 servers) are cooled by air. Pod B's (about 120 kW, like NVIDIA's 72-GPU GB200 racks) make three times the heat in the same space, more than air can carry. So a coolant distribution unit pumps liquid through cold plates on the chips themselves. Both loops end on the roof, where dry coolers blow outside air across the hot water. Many data centers use evaporative cooling towers instead: less electricity, but they drink water.
Click any rack (or press Overload) to push it past what its cooling can carry. Its chips heat up, and at about 86 °C they throttle: they slow themselves down to survive, and the compute is lost to heat. Reroute cooling sends more coolant and air to that rack so it can run flat out.
1,248 GPUs in 24 racks. Load levels are shares of each rack's maximum (idle servers still draw about a quarter). Facility power adds fans, pumps, transformer and battery losses to the chips' own power; the ratio of the two is the PUE, about 1.1 to 1.3 in a modern hall (the industry average is about 1.56, Uptime Institute 2024). A US home uses about 10,800 kWh a year, 1.23 kW on average (EIA). Temperatures are illustrative: cold aisles sit inside ASHRAE's recommended 18–27 °C. Heat out trails power in because the building soaks some up first.
1 2 3 idle, inference, training · K cooling water · P power · F airflow · L liquid · T temperature · O overload a rack · G reroute cooling · C cinematic cameras · N labels · R reset the view · / hide the interface · drag to orbit · right-drag to pan · scroll to zoom · WASD to move, Q E to turn.
1
2
3
K
P
F
L
T
O
G
C
N
R
/
W
A
S
D
Q
E