Fifteen-year-old Calgary student, Ania Udofia, has placed at this year’s World of 8 Billion International Student Video Contest.

Anie was one of 5,000 students to enter the competition, but her project examining methods to cool down AI data centres set her apart from the crowd. As part of her research, the teen realized the popular evaporative technique to cool down the facilities could be improved.

“I realized all that water is being wasted because of this specific strategy that they are using which is evaporative cooling,” Anie says, “And that there are other ways that we get to mitigate this through immersive cooling that I did more research about.”

Anie added that she was shocked to learn some data centres use 5 million gallons of water a day to cool servers. Her solution is to move to a liquid immersion technique, submerging servers in non-conductive fluid and eliminating water waste.

“I had already been exploring ways in which AI can be used,” Anie says, “but I also wanted to explore the negatives and how it affects the environment and also the energy sector, as well.”

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Anie researched, shot and edited her one-minute video project herself. Her cooling theory video earned her an honourable mention at the competition and a $300 prize.

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Richard Zhao, an AI expert from the University of Calgary’s computer science department, weighed in on what current cooldown methods are used for data centres.

“There’s recycling water centres where they essentially take the water and then they try to cool the data center, recycle the water so they can use it again,” he says. “Another way to cool a data centre is using running water.”

Zhao also mentioned that the difference in size of data centres requires different cooling techniques.