Cerebras engineer explains wafer-scale cooling: water flows straight into the wafer
bookwormengr · x · 2026-11-03
A Cerebras engineer details the cooling solution for their dinner-plate-sized wafer chip. Early AI data centers retrofitted from crypto mining used air cooling (loud, energy-hungry), now being phased out. Water cooling was pioneered at Cerebras and later adopted by NVIDIA and AMD data centers, but remains tricky at wafer scale.
Key design: the chip is too large for water to flow parallel across it, so water flows straight towards and away from the wafer. Cooling heavily affects chip reliability and aging.
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