Cooling and Powering the Data Centre: War, Orbit and a $1.1M Fine

Two stories about data centre power and cooling landed within a day of each other this week. They point in opposite directions. One is about a facility that quietly built its own power supply and got caught. The other is about a company trying to move the problem off the planet.

Start in New Jersey. Ars Technica reports that the state's Department of Environmental Protection fined DataOne $1.1 million. An investigation by The Guardian and Floodlight News used thermal drone footage to show that 45 of 62 gas generators at the Vineland site were running. None held the permits required for units of 37 kilowatts or higher. Ars Technica adds that the generators ran at 1,982 kilowatts, more than 50 times the state threshold.

The DEP says such generators emit carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and other combustion pollutants. The state called it the largest enforcement action ever taken against a data centre in New Jersey.

A fine, a deadline, and a site that keeps running

DataOne has 45 days to apply for permits or stop operating. Under the current order, it can keep the engines running while it seeks them. That gap is what residents are angry about. Nichole Gardner of the local environmental group Sustain SJ told Ars the penalty is "insufficient, both in dollar amount and enforcement," and argued the site should halt operations until permits are issued.

In a statement to The New York Times, a DataOne spokesperson said the company "will apply for the air permits for the temporary generators" and that it "disagreed" with the fine. The spokesperson said the site is "transitioning to low-emission, quiet fuel cells."

"What's $1.07 million?" resident Tiffany Leone-Vespa told the NYT. "They should have done it for each generator they were running, illegally. They're billionaires. It's like pocket change."

Ars Technica notes the generators were "impossible to miss" when state inspectors finally visited the 2.6 million square foot complex in July. They were not present at the previous visit in December 2025. Floodlight reported DataOne withdrew an earlier permit application in May after the DEP found multiple deficiencies. The site powers Microsoft AI tools including Copilot. Residents told the NYT they worry the company will do whatever it takes to keep that deal.

New Jersey has more than 80 data centres planned or under construction. It recently passed a law ending data centre tax credits, cutting off a fund that had offered $250 million in incentives.

Google's answer: put the server in space

Google's Project Suncatcher takes the opposite approach to the same problem. Ars Technica reported on 24 September that the first experimental satellite, called MVP, launches on 1 October aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 as part of the Transporter-18 rideshare. The satellite is about the size of a refrigerator and carries four of Google's custom TPU AI accelerators.

Tom's Hardware reports the solar panels supply about one kilowatt, roughly enough to run a microwave. The cooling system uses a layer of malleable thermal interface material connecting the chips to aluminium and copper heat pipes. These conduct heat into a radiator that projects it into space. There is no air up there for a fan.

Even so, the four chips overheat. Both outlets report the TPUs can only run for about 15 minutes before they must shut down and let the radiators catch up. Radiation is the other problem: it can flip bits and corrupt calculations. Google's current answer is to restart the chips periodically. The spacecraft itself came from satellite imagery firm Planet Labs, not Google.

James Manyika, Google's senior vice president of research, is not overselling it. "We don't expect, to be perfectly frank, that we'll have anything usefully operational in the next few years," he told The New York Times. He compared the effort to Google's driverless cars, tested "like 15 years before anything showed up."

On the ground, the same physics problem

Earth-bound operators have no radiator option. An analysis in Data Center Knowledge lays out why full renewable power remains impractical for most facilities. Wind and solar vary with weather. Geothermal needs specialised plants and supplies under 0.5 percent of US electricity. Storage requires battery arrays that carry their own cost. The practical answer, the piece argues, is partial procurement plus efficiency measures such as liquid cooling.

Meanwhile IEEE Spectrum reported in May 2025 on xMEMS, which has adapted its ultrasonic "fan-on-a-chip" to fit inside pluggable optical transceivers. In a data centre with 400,000 GPUs, Nvidia estimates transceivers burn 40 megawatts. The MEMS chip pumps 39 cubic centimetres of air per second through a device about a millimetre high. xMEMS predicts it can drop the DSP temperature by more than 15 percent. Production silicon from TSMC was expected in June, with full production in the first quarter of 2026.

The three stories share one constraint. Every watt of compute has to go somewhere as heat, and the cheapest place to put it is still someone else's neighbourhood.