Read the full article by Liz McLaughlin (WRAL)
“The artificial intelligence race is creating demand for more than data centers and electricity. It is also creating a new market for the chemicals needed to keep increasingly powerful computer chips from overheating.
Some of those cooling technologies rely on PFAS, a broad class of fluorinated compounds already responsible for widespread drinking water contamination in North Carolina.
Now, Chemours, the company at the center of the Cape Fear PFAS contamination, is developing a fluorinated fluid called Opteon 2P50 to cool high-powered data center servers.
The chemical is still awaiting federal approval and is not yet commercially available in the United States. Chemours says it could dramatically reduce the water and energy required for cooling, an appealing proposition as communities raise concerns about the resource demands of new data centers.
Those concerns are already playing out across North Carolina, where residents are asking what large data centers could mean for local water supplies.
For Laura McKelvey, a Chapel Hill resident who spent 34 years working for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the concern extends beyond how much water data centers use.”…