The liquid, which the Palo Alto Fire Department has deemed to be a nonhazardous mixture of borax, lye (also called sodium hydroxide) and green dye,
One of the workers told Hedblom that the liquid was a coolant. That’s also what the fire department told the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, which wrote in its Oct. 18 spill report that the liquid was “used for the chiller system to cool the Tesla Artificial Intelligence Supercomputer.”
“The Palo Alto Fire Department recovered approximately 550 gallons of the mixture from the storm drain,” the report said. “The incident occurred while Tesla personnel were draining the system.”
That’s quite a liquid-cooled computer that they’ve got going on.
The article mentions that they said the initial spill was 12 gallons but then mixed with water in the drain, which is where the 550 gallon number comes from. That’s coming from Tesla, so it might be them trying to downplay the incident, so take it with a grain of salt. But it does seem to make more sense than a single computer needing 550 gallons of coolant.
I suspect it was the entire building’s chiller in which that really isn’t that much. When you consider the run of pipes depending on where the outdoor tower is.
That’s quite a liquid-cooled computer that they’ve got going on.
The article mentions that they said the initial spill was 12 gallons but then mixed with water in the drain, which is where the 550 gallon number comes from. That’s coming from Tesla, so it might be them trying to downplay the incident, so take it with a grain of salt. But it does seem to make more sense than a single computer needing 550 gallons of coolant.
Well… it’s air-cooled now.
I suspect it was the entire building’s chiller in which that really isn’t that much. When you consider the run of pipes depending on where the outdoor tower is.